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Phishing Attacks - Latest Advice

The bulk of the following information and the example messages shown came from Emsisoft - the top performing Anti-Malware company in recent tests like that shown below the famous antivirus laboratory MalwareResearchGroup:-

Emsisoft Anti-Malware has now taken the lead in the overall ranking for antivirus and antimalware programs in 2011 and therefore shows its enormous strength in the protection against new online threats. This is achieved by using the following three security layers:

• Surf protection which blocks the access to known malicious websites
• Dual-engine file guard with more than 5 million signatures of known malware
• Behavior blocker for zero-day malware that nobody was yet able to analyze and report on.

How phishing works

Fraudsters like using well-known company names for two reasons; first, these names appear trustworthy and second, the recipient is quite likely to be an actual customer of theirs. The objectives of these fake emails vary: The author may be attempting Identity Theft - or is perhaps trying to infect your PC with malware - or he may be after your money in various ways...

Example 1:

This is a classic phishing attempt, but luckily for us a bad one. Poor grammar and the lack of the company return address stand out in particular. The dubious email address should also make you suspicious.

In addition you will surely have noticed that it is not addressed personally. If you still click on the link of the obviously fake email, you are going to be asked to enter your credit card details on a fake website. If you actually do enter your data then you should not be surprised by the strange charges on your next credit card bill. The screen shot shows clearly