Spam News

Phishing scams don't just fool the ignorant, FBI head Mueller says

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Not even the head of the FBI - director Robert Mueller - is immune from the threat of online phishing scams, which use sophisticated social engineering tricks to scam people into giving up bank account and other vital information.

Mueller said in a speech Wednesday that he nearly fell for a phishing scam in a phony email that appeared to come from his bank. After Mueller caught himself before giving away his account information, his wife banned him from online banking, CNET News reported.

After hackers published up to 30,000 stolen email account passwords online last week - including thousands from Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and other popular webmail services - security experts have been advising email users to strengthen their passwords.

Web security researchers said some of the most common passwords used by victims of the email phishing scheme were plainly insecure, such as 123456.

But having a secure password is only the beginning step of protecting against online threats from identity thieves.

Users should keep their computers up to date with the latest security software and security patches for software and application vulnerabilities.

Perhaps most vital, users should avoid opening spam email or email attachments from untrusted sources.