Phishers learn new tricks: new targeted phishing attack against the Department of Computer Science

04.02.2014 - 19:20 - 22:45
Description: 

Once more we have seen a new targeted phishing attack against the Department of Computer Science. Only ten days passed since the previous massive attack, not counting the smaller ones destined to certainly fail. This time the attack was little but more clever: (1) The phishing spam was bilingual - Finnish and English like our news releases, (2) the phishing web site used  the faculty color like our webpages, (3) the university logo was included, and (4) even the page title was "Tietojenkäsittelytieteen laitos" in plain Finnish..

Some features of this attack are very similar to the previous attack: The phishing emails were sent using an email account of a US university that has outsourced its email services and the fake login page was hosted by a large web hosting provider.

Our spam detector has been modified to recognize these phishing emails and the abuse department of the hosting provider has been asked to take down the fake login page. 

All phishing emails (connected to this attack) have been automatically removed from user's inboxes. This kind of retroactive unwanted email detection and deletion is not normal practice and will not be carried out without serious reasons but was consireded necessary in this case.

REMEMBER

The Department of Computer Science websites always show  https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/...  in your browser's address bar. Never enter your login name and password into a site without this: those sites are scams.

 

04.02.2014 - 23:58 Petri Kutvonen
04.02.2014 - 23:47 Petri Kutvonen