McAfee Reports Recent phishing attempts have been targeting some popular social networking sites and jobs websites, such as facebook.com and monster.com. Due to the amount of personal and sensitive information which is saved there, they are very valuable to phishers. This data could be used to further target or spear phish individual victims by name and even work interests.
We have seen phishing attacks which targeted careerbuilder.com in the past. The latest target is another big recruitment site - monster.com. Just like typical financial phishing emails, the Monster phishing emails have subjects including imperatives like “Monster customer service: important notice” or “Monster customer service: please confirm your data!”
But please do not be fooled! These are not from Monster at all!!
The phishing domain would appear to be hosted on a new UK domain with dns leading to a bot in Turkey. We can see from this phishing site, the phisher is mainly targeting recruiters for their logins and passwords. This would enable them to access hundreds or even thousands of job seekers’ CVs which often contain a gold mine of sensitive data. Other elements of the recruiters account could be useful as well.
The level of personal data on a CV is pretty high, and in the wrong hands outright dangerous. Be vigilant against unsolicited emails!
Banks today are increasingly getting introduced to a number of security threats. The ones in headlines have been Phishing, Key Logging and Man-in-the-Middle. We will find a number of online banking users who are naïve to this kind of technology and the threats associated with it. It is necessary to help them understand the precautions they must take to prevent being a victim of online theft.
Consumer education becomes a key element to prevent the manifestation of a number of risks into frauds. It is much easier for the experienced eyes of an internet-savvy user to detect potential phishing attempts when compared with a customer who has recently migrated from old school of banking to more recent modes.
On a happy note, there are solutions in the market to tackle problems of phishing, key loggers and man-in-the-middle attacks. But these are expensive solutions and not full proof.
Business Security Buy-In: Given the customer base or other reasons, it has not been easy for the banks to justify investing in secure solutions for online banking. In fact, many banks are willing to compensate for the fraud losses of the customers as they find it more cost effective than putting up a secure solution.
Security Challenges: Banks have to continuously evaluate the risks, cost of technology solutions and even upgradations. .It gets all the more challenging due to a variety of technological solutions available in the market, each addressing individual problems but none offering a one-stop solution.
Phishing is an attack where the attacker sends a mail making it look as if it has come from a bank or a financial institution and lures the victim into entering his sensitive information.
Image based keyboard (or virtual keyboards) were invented to make life harder for banking or phishing Trojan horses (specifically key-stroke loggers or key loggers), some even suggested they be used specifically to avoid these Trojan horses.
