Phishing email takes numerous forms
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The practice of impersonating authoritative websites and sources in order to convince victims to divulge personal information - known as phishing - has come a long way from the Nigerian "419" scams that popularized the technique in the public mind. Modern phishing is becoming increasingly dangerous in part because attacks can come from a variety of sources.
Elinor Mills, writing for CNET, says that a common tactic for today's phishers is to impersonate the fraud office of a bank or other authoritative entity, asking the victim to "verify" their login information on a cleverly disguised website that records the data for future fraudulent use.
Mills says that most phishing emails come from outside the U.S., indicating that an overseas email suffix like ".co.uk," particularly if the message is purportedly coming from an American firm, should raise red flags for potential targets. An urgent tone, misspellings, and other grammatical errors should also be a tip-off that a message might be a come-on.
Phishing emails can also attempt to infect PCs with malware as a second way to steal personal information from victims. The Zeus and Clampi Trojans are common payloads for this type of attack.
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