According to SC Magazine, for security professionals, there are two new Phishing scams that you should be aware of.

The first scam uses a reference to the recipient’s holiday credit card spending pattern during the Christmas season. The start of this phishing campaign coincides with the arrival of credit card statements and is expected to last until the middle of next month. As usual, social engineering will play a major part in the attack – an email will be received by advising of problems with their credit card transactions and will target the gathering of account information, like account numbers, usernames and passwords. The concern is that people do get confused at this time of year because of the number of transactions conducted over November / December for Christmas.

This information was gathered from SC Magazine.

The second phishing campaign that tries to trick recipients into believing their employer committed payroll reporting fraud. The attack comes as a trojan-laced, socially engineered email run developed by a Romanian-based criminal group. The messages appears to come from the National Payroll Reporting Consortium (NPRG), a nonprofit that provides payroll processing services to employers. The email suggestst that their employer has tried to cut costs by making “numerous misrepresentations regarding worker classification”.

Of course, to rectify the problem, the recipients are urged to fill out an attached form, but the attachment actually contains a trojan that installs a malicious browser helper object that steals user data from web forms. The trojan registers itself to be called every time data is entered into a form, stores it and then sends it to the attacker’s website.

The NPRG have issued a statement on its website and advises people to immediately delete the email if it is received.

More information is available at SC Magazine.

To make sure you are protected from any malware that is contained within Emails or on Websites, use should be made of a quality antivirus / antispyware product, like PC Tools.

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| This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 8:38 am and is filed under PC Security, Phishing, Social Engineering, Trojans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.