'Phishing' scams luring more users

The number of "phishing" e-mails circulating on the Web has increased from 279 to 215,643 over the past six months, according to e-mail security company MessageLabs.

Phishing is an Internet scam in which unsuspecting users receive official-looking e-mails that attempt to fool them into disclosing online passwords, user names and other personal information. Victims are usually persuaded to click on a link that directs them to a doctored version of an organization's Web site.

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MessageLabs, which monitors corporate e-mail traffic, said Monday that in September 2003 the company encountered just 279 phishing e-mails. In January 2004, this figure reached 337,050 and then dropped back to 215,643 by March. The company said it is impossible to estimate exactly how many people have been fooled by the phishers.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), which was formed in November 2003 to provide a forum for financial institutions to share information about new phishing campaigns, recently warned its members about an attack that can modify the victim's browser by replacing the address bar with a Java applet. This allows the attacker to take the victim to any Web site but display the address of an official Web site in the browser's window, increasing the chances of fooling people.

According to the APWG's Web site, the new attack targeted Citibank customers at the end of March. "This sophisticated new attack automatically detects the consumer's browser and applies a custom JavaScript that replaces the look and feel of the Web address bar with an appropriately designed working fake. You can even type in the bank's Web address directly into the fake address bar--this is a live piece of JavaScript code, not a static fake address bar image," the organization said.

Munir Kotadia of ZDNet UK reported from London.

[wes3840]

Norton/Symantec phish?

I have gotten several "Undeliverable" messages in my main email inbox lately, they are all reporting attempts to email various address with a .ru domain, and the sender shows a name in some other Eastern European language with my email address in brackets after that name. This has me thinking I am victim to a remailing trojan of some sort, so I went to the Symantec site (www.norton.com is what I typed in) to look for discussions or forums; while there I clicked on the Updates button and it said I needed several updates to my Norton Systemworks and asked me to input account information. Now my installed Systemworks shows that I have all the latest updates for all components, so I became suspicious that perhaps this was not the "real" Norton site, anyone encountered problems such as this?

Java applet != JavaScript

The article implies that a Java applet and JavaScript are the same thing, but they are completely different. Which is it?

What does this affect?

Nowhere in the story does it say what browsers and what operating systems the phony tool bar can affect. I would like to know if it affects Mozilla or Firefox on Windows? Does it affect any browsers on Macintosh and if so which ones? I mostly use Linux for my web surfing, does it affect any browsers there?