Archive for October, 2010

Oct 06 2010

FBI is taken into phishing campaign by Nigeria

Published by under Security Research

What would you do if your inbox has an email from FBI? Today, I received an email from FBI. Sender is Mr. Bill Nicholson (bil.nischolson@fbi.gov), “Special Agent” from “Federal Bureau of Investigation”. I wonder he is “Nicholson” or ‘Nischolson”.
From the email, I was informed that I am a lottery winner. However, I need to contact an FBI agent (who is located in Nigeria) and pay a fee in order to process with the transaction. Also, you have to provide him some credentials.

The email posing as FBI

This email is more sophisticated than the Yahoo fake email. If you decide to reply the email, your email will be sent to Mr. Femi Cole. This “agent”, in fact, is a hacker. You are sending email to a hacker:

The email is actually sent from charlo@coreggy.com

Phishing emails posing as FBI are not new. However, many victims still fall prey to this type of emails, because they will likely think that it is from Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Nowadays, hackers are capable of posing as any big names such as FBI, Microsoft, Google or Yahoo, etc. Please be cautious if you suddenly receive any email informing that you can receive a large amount of cash and you need to contact someone to get it. There is no such easy thing in real life.

Nguyen Thanh Tuan
Security Researcher

1 Comment

Oct 02 2010

Yahoo! Phishing – Yahoo faked to fool users for passwords

Published by under Security Research

Recently, we have noticed a considerable increase in the number of attacks impersonating Yahoo. Hacker posing as “The Yahoo! Mail Team” sends victims emails with subject “Update Your Account!!!”.

Emails with Yahoo’s logo inform that Yahoo will shut down some accounts of users for security reasons. To avoid this, users have to confirm their email accounts by replying this email with their personal information including passwords.

It’s hard for victims to recognize this Yahoo! fake email.

When users reply this email to provide their usernames and passwords, their email will not be sent to Yahoo, but to hacker’s emails. This is one of the hacker’s email addresses:

Specifically, the header of the spam emails is as below:
Hacker uses a server named SAMSUNG-PC with IP from the U.S.A

If you are gullible, you may easily fall victim to such phishing campaign. In fact, there is no company requiring you to provide them with your username and password in an email.

Users should be cautious, not to disclose such sensitive information as password or credit card information to anyone.

Tran Hoai Linh
Security Researcher

1 Comment

« Prev