Phishing scams Paralympics

I’ve seen these emails in my Spambox but didn’t even bother opening them they were so clearly spam-scam-junk. This article from ComputerWorld though tells the story. I’ve edited out some content.

Fraudsters plumb new depths Paralympian donation scheme targeted by email ‘phishers’

Masquerading as a message from Westpac Bank in Australia, the email solicits donations for the country’s Paralympics team for the Athens games in August. …

Computerworld analysed the bogus message and traced it to a site hosted in the US … which attempts to download two files from the website.

The last of the two files is a … “keylogger”, a small application that surreptitiously keeps track what users type. In this case, Bizex would log users’ credit card numbers as they type them in to make the donations.

This means the scammers don’t need to set up bogus websites to obtain people’s credit card numbers — rather they could simply direct victims to the correct payments processor and the donation would be made. The card numbers could then be used by the scammers.

The W32.Bizex.Worm affects: Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows XP.

Systems Not Affected: DOS, Linux, Macintosh, OS/2, UNIX, Windows 3.x.

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