New Phishing Scam Spoofs Social Security Administration
May 11th, 2009 by Scott OlsonAn SC Magazine article, out today, reports that a new phishing attack is now targeting individuals who will be receiving an economic payout later this month.
Phishing attacks are usually at the forefront of identity collection in today’s Fraud as a Service process. Phishing utilizes social engineering, which is both one of the oldest forms of security attack and is one of the hardest to fix. Social engineering tricks users into giving up sensitive data that online criminals would normally have a very difficult time obtaining in any other way. Today, the users personal information is the target of choice, but this is also very effective for obtaining account information and passwords.
Combating phishing isn’t difficult, it just requires the user to keep in mind that online businesses simply will not ask for sensitive information in an e-mail or link to a page that collects that data from an e-mail.
Tags: fraud as a service, identity theft, Online Fraud, Phishing
May 28th, 2009 at 1:03 am
Please, can you tell me few more things about this, I am really a fan of your blog… Thank you.
June 1st, 2009 at 6:34 am
There hasn’t been any new news about this particular incident since May 11th, but the essence of it is that scammers are targeting recipients of tax rebates with fake e-mails that direct them to a scammer website that poses to be the Social Security Administration. From there they use social engineering to obtain their social security number as well as other personal information. This is just another variation of phishing attacks that have been becoming more prevalent over the past 5 to 10 years. Wikipedia has a good writeup about phishing at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing. Hope that helps.
June 1st, 2009 at 7:56 am
[...] a recent post I spoke about the recent phishing attack spoofing the social security administration. Today I would like to discuss a variation of this identity theft scam, vishing. Where phishing [...]