Phishing the Government

OK, so this is something I haven't seen before:

The criminals have now started phishing using the government as the lure (the IRS is the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. tax department). Of course, the refund would have been far more compelling had it happened around the time when people file their tax returns in the U.S.

The site it goes to appears to be in Korea, but it also appears to be down. Most likely it was just some compromised computer somewhere.

One more odd thing struck me about this. As you see in the picture, Outlook 2007 detected this as a possible phishing message; but only on one computer. On my other computer it was just plain junk mail. That's a bit disconcerting. Apparently the phishing detection logic in Outlook is not consistent, even within versions.

Published 22 September 2007 09:38 AM by jesper

Comments

# mattmu said on 24 September, 2007 11:03 AM

I recently saw a case where a customer's IIS server had been hacked. The bad guys installed Apache and were apparently serving the pages to go along with this scam.

I still haven't figured out how the compromised took place, but I find it interesting that they'd install Apache on a box running IIS. But there were enough hits in the IIS logs to suggest that this really could be a very profitable venture for the bad guys.

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