Spear phishing results in 60-hour spam attack
Monday, August 18, 2008
A group of hackers were able to capitalise on an email security weakness and send 1.55 million spam emails in 60 hours in recent days.
The users gained access to the University of Otago in New Zealand's staff email server after tricking four members of staff into revealing their login details, a blog post by Danco Danchev on web resource ZDNet notes.
As a result of the IT security failure, which resulted in the "huge volume" of unwanted mail being sent, legitimate emails were rejected or delayed by other systems, information services manager Mike Harte said.
The staff members had responded to spear phishing emails which purported to be from the college's IT department and asked users to reconfirm their passwords and emails or have their accounts closed down.
In recent days, it was reported by Secure Computing that Angelina Jolie is the most popular celebrity name used to tempt people into opening online spam email.
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