Sample Phishing Spam - eBay

A particularly dangerous spam and commonly known as "Phishing" attempts to trick recipients into disclosing personal sensitive information, such as login names, passwords or credit card information. It works by requesting users to click on a link to login into their account to update certain information. Visitors are instead directed to counterfeit websites which are exact duplicates of the actual website. Any information entered into the counterfeit website is then captured and stolen for identity theft. Favorite targets are eBay, PayPal and other well known financial institutions...

In the interest of originality, the body of the message is left unaltered as much as possible. But for security reasons, and to protect the reputation of our own website from being seen as linking to bogus websites, the links in the spam message have been disabled. Placing your mouse over them will show the original url it intended to link to, but clicking on them will bring you to spamhaus.org, a non-profit organization for combating spam.

From: "aw-confirm@ebay.com" <aw-confirm@ebay.com> To: you@yahoo.com Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:56:20 -0700 Subject: [TKO] : your (eBay) account could be suspended

The message above has been cropped as it won't fit into such a small space. To view the full message, please click here for the full eBay Phishing Spam. A new window will open displaying the entire message in html format.

Points to note :-

• Forged from email aw-confirm@ebay.com
• The spam originated from New York, USA
• The counterfeit website it was pointing to is http://www.vbsf.dk/signin.ebay.com Notice the misleading url name. The website was formerly registered to a dutch, but it had expired and was snapped up by the spammer. By the time we investigated the website, it had already been shutdown, probably as a result of complaints from the public.
• This message made it past our Yahoo spam filter. It uses html email and pulls the images directly from eBay's server. This could explain why it slipped past Yahoo's filter.
• In the body of the message itself, none of the purported links to eBay works.

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