Thursday, July 3, 2008
A variation on the Nigerian Letter phishing scam has been identified in a new report examining spam trends in July.
Cited by IT Business, the report shows that fraudsters are now targeting the address book contacts of unsuspecting users who have had their email accounts hacked.
The phishing scam attempted to add further credibility by appending the user's auto-signature at the bottom of the email.
However, the email security attack did not end there, with compromised accounts scanned for auction site login details.
"The hacker then began bidding on a number of laptops being sold in the UK and instructed that the laptops be sent to Nigeria," the report noted.
Such attacks were logged across multiple organizations and webmail accounts.
Online advisory service Millersmiles has noted that 419 names are so-called because this is the Nigerian penal code which the phishing scams are logged under.
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