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While America sleeps, and the drive-by media obsesses over who will buy the U.S. presidency, billions of internet users' dollars are being put to work for online crime... and ICANN, the people who bring you the internet, are planning their escape from Washington, D.C. ... Not good news!
The Internal Revenue Service has become a popular brand with phishers, and with tax season under way we probably can expect to see plenty of e-mails purportedly from the IRS offering help with refunds and directing us to suspect Web sites.
In January, one anti-spam company reported that phony IRS e-mail accounted for 1 percent of all spam, Treasury Special Agent Andy Fried said Wednesday at the Black Hat Federal Briefings in Washington. GCN.com - Washington, DC, USA
As accountants sharpen pencils and file W-2s in preparation for the tax season, everyone, including students, should be on the lookout for "phishing" scams intended to steal tax and other personal information in their email inboxes, experts say.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently issued a statement warning consumers not to be fooled by Internet scam artists who pose as Internal Revenue Service officials in order to steal information that people would normally provide on federal tax forms.
Just such an attack came through this morning -- sent from the IRS, but leading to a spoofed IRS web page in India. Daily Free Press - Boston, MA, USA
Like the Bank of America brand name, the United States Internal Revenue Service is a brand that also needs online protection. On Wednesday, Special Agent Andy Fried with the U.S. Treasury Department gave a second keynote address to start off Black Hat DC 2008. He said as of February 19 this year, there were 1,630 phishing sites using the IRS name or logo, marking a 12 percent to 17 percent increase over last year. CNET News.com - San Francisco, CA, USA
Today, IRS estimates that over 1600 IRS phishing sites are operating or online at any given time, just looking for potential victims to hand over sensitive data about themselves. In addition to phishing attempts, Fried noted that the IRS has tracked incidents in which citizens received pretexting calls -- as in a call on a pretext of someone claiming to be from the IRS. InternetNews.com - USA
One could never have imagined the evolution of crimeware over the last couple of months could follow defined patterns within an established ecosystem. Malware creation groups, very much follow the model and organization of their legitimate counterparts, finding everyway possible to make profit. CIO - Framingham, MA, USA
While there may well be some very smart people that are profiting from phishing, a pair of security researchers at Black Hat have argued that most aren't all that bright. In a presentation titled, "Bad Sushi Beating Phishers at Their Own Game" researchers Nitesh Dhanjani and Billy Rios demonstrated (sometimes with hilarious detail) how many phishing attempts are basic and not the work of sophisticated ninja hackers. InternetNews.com - USA
This latest round of phishing emails claim to be sent from the university's email administrators, requesting verification of email accounts. The Internet Storm Center's Universities in the US being targeted in a Spear Phishing attack page shows an example of such an email. UC Berkeley - Berkeley, CA, USA
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