Spam News

Spam threat: Anatomy of a phishing spam scam

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Email security depends not only on the success of anti-spam filters and firewall defenses, but on the ability of users to detect fraud and scams. After a wave of phishing attacks hit Hotmail and other webmail users, experts said educating users is vital.

Phishing attacks rely on spoofing or imitating legitimate companies and services to encourage users to give up their personal information, such as bank accounts or email passwords.

Neowin.net, which reported that 20,000 Hotmail account passwords were leaked to a website last week, found an example of a spam email that claimed to be from Microsoft telling recipients to reconfigure their Windows Live Hotmail account.

The spam email used the Microsoft logo and told potential victims to "follow these steps to complete the setup of your account." Users would be directed to a website designed to steal their password.

Phishing scams also target users of social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Once a scammer has scammed a user into divulging their login credentials, the scammer can take over their account for sending out spam messages to snag other users.

One trick used by phishing scammers uses hijacked social networking accounts to spam their list of contacts. Users who think they are receiving a message from a "friend" may be scammed into giving up their account information.