Fake Pink Slips and Spear Phishing
Posted on Friday, November 3, 2006 by Frank Roche
Here’s a new one: What happens when your employees get a fake pink slip that looks like the real thing? It’s happening right now, with an e-mail scam called “spear phishing”:
A phishing scam caught a number of employees at the Dekalb Medical Center in Decatur, GA. They were sent what appeared to be notices from their employer, telling them they were fired, with a link to a “career counselling site.” Loading the site installed a keylogger on your computer. (via BoingBoing)
When employees of Dekalb Medical Center got fake termination notices, they were aggravated enough to click on a “career counseling” link in the e-mail Wham! Bam! Scam! They were “spear phished” into a key logger virus.
Time for an HR/IT confab. And a note to your employees today. Tell them that you don’t send out pink slips by e-mail. (You don’t, do you?) And tell them that they should NEVER click on links that they don’t recognize.
Photo credit: DMSCVAN
Charlie
Nov 4th, 2006
..and give them the tools to repel infection.
Frank
Nov 4th, 2006
Charlie, right, my sense was that stuff like that shouldn’t get through. What I read, though, was that the phishers are getting smarter…spear phishing is low volume so the spam algorithms don’t seem to catch them as easily.