Friday, March 18, 2011

Ongoing Phishing Attack targeting PayPal, Bank of America, Lloyds and TSB

This new story by US-CERT shows they have become aware of reports on a new phishing attack. Apparently it's bypassing some of the new phishing protection built-in to many browsers. The team at CudaMail have also noted the new campaign (fortunately with a global network of 100,000 spam firewalls feeding "zero hour" threat information to the reputation database, it begins thwarting such campaigns very early), and have been successfully blocking it.

The US-CERT Story:

US-CERT is aware of public reports of an ongoing phishing attack. At this time, this attack appears to be targeting PayPal, Bank of America, Lloyds, and TSB users. The attack arrives via an unsolicited email message containing an HTML attachment.Email Phishing Scams This attack is unlike common phishing attacks because it locally stores the malicious webpage rather than directing user to a phishing site via a URL. Many browsers utilize anti-phishing filters to help protect users against phishing attacks, this method of attack is able to bypass this security mechanism. US-CERT encourages users and administrators to take the following measures to protect themselves from these types of phishing attacks:
  • Do not follow unsolicited web links or attachments in email messages.
  • Use caution when providing personal information online.
  • Verify the legitimacy of the email by contacting the organization directly through a trusted contact method.
Relevant Url(s): Link to the original story.

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