The latest targets of a spear phishing attack, which aspires to take the login names and passwords of members in order to stage attacks, are the Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.
Phishing attacks on Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were carried out individually from partial attacks on Gmail, according to the report of Trend Micro. Google exposed that several of Gmail accounts were compromised in attacks that created from servers in China, even though Chinese officers said they are not accountable.
The individual Gmail accounts that were breached comprise those owned by government officials, reporters and activist. However, the White House said no government email accounts were accessed. Hillary Rodham Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State called the spear phishing attacks and that the F.B.I. has opened an investigation.
Spear phishing attacks is a kind of scam that consists of persuasive the user to voluntarily give their login name, password and other individual information by means of several original social engineering.
Nart Villeneuve, TreandLabs senior threat researcher said, the attackers aim was to access members Webmail accounts in order to check activity and ready for upcoming attacks. Villanueve clarified: “In the case revealed by Google, the attackers used a phishing attack to gain access to the target’s Gmail account them proceeded to add their own email addresses to the ‘forwarding and delegation settings’, allowing them to send and receive email messages via the compromised accounts.”
photo credit: thenextweb.com
