New phishing scam targets high level executives

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IT News:   TechRepublic.com

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New phishing scam targets high level executives


Date: April 16th, 2008
Author: Andy Moon
Category: News, Security
Host: Sonja Thompson

Link to original article

A new phishing attack has been circulating lately, but instead of trying to dupe millions of computer users into giving up their financial information, this one is aimed at high level executives. The e-mail scam purports to notify the executive about court proceedings and tries to get them to click a link that installs keylogging software as well as software designed to let a hacker take control of the computer. Unfortunately, social engineering, the process of tricking a user into trusting requests from a hacker, is getting to be a major problem, and if the hackers are successful in their latest attack, they could be holding some valuable passwords.

The government is responding by closing thousands of paths from their networks to the Internet as a result of an order by President Bush. At least one security researcher has begun to develop software that will allow him to infect hacking tools with his own malware as security in those tools is lacking.

揗ost malware authors are not the most careful programmers,