Phisher takes advantage of IM accounts for fraud

The latest trick of phishers is to steal an instant messenger account (IM) of an Internet user to trick people into providing their personal information.

Security experts say this is an extremely malicious trick. It is part of an effort to equip themselves with more effective tools to attack Internet users of online scammers.

Appropriating someone else's instant messaging account will be a very effective tool for scammers in spreading their 'bait'. Security experts evaluate the success rate if using instant messages to scam can be very high because instant messages are personal.

Another part is the psychology of instant messaging users, who often assume that only their friends know their chat nick and can send messages to them. Therefore, if you receive a "decoy" message from the scammers, the proportion of Internet users who click on those linked is relatively high.

Traditional forms of phishing attacks such as spoofing spam emails as legitimate emails of some individual organization to Internet users' mailboxes trick them into clicking on the links in it now It is no longer highly effective when users are increasingly provided with information and trained to recognize emails of this type.

Last Friday, a Yahoo! employee found out that online scammers used her instant messaging account to send a link to a phishing site to every member on the list. Contact her Yahoo Messenger. Perhaps online scammers have hijacked her Yahoo Messenger account in another scam.

The website sent during the attack took advantage of Yahoo employees' own Yahoo Messenger account, a website hosted on Yahoo's free Geocities web service. The fake website has a form that looks very similar to Yahoo Photos website and requires users to enter their Yahoo! login account.

Yahoo service provider quickly removed this site. ' These are extremely dangerous people. We must strive to prevent them with all our capabilities , 'the Yahoo representative said.

Education plays a very important role in preventing online fraud via instant messaging, Yahoo representatives said. Users need to know that it should not be overly confident that the most instant messages are those containing a link because it can be a link to malicious, phishing or virus websites. .

Phishing is a security threat that is becoming increasingly popular on the Internet. In August, there were a total of more than 26,150 phishing sites discovered by the Anti-Phishing Working Group.

Hoang Dung