SPAM - It's annoying yes, but dangerous?
New trend in phishing scams could mean rise in identity theft cases.

Thursday, January 27, 2005

SPAM, It's annoying yes, but dangerous? Here in the trenches of the computer and internet security world we are seeing a new trend. SPAM messages have been annoying from day one. Now they could mean a dramatic rise in Identity theft cases.

As an annoyance, and a gross time consumer, SPAM has always been the bane of email users. What we are seeing now though is phishing scams not designed to be copies of known banking institutions, but designed to look like ordinary SPAM messages. We've all seen a SPAM or two that "almost" sounded interesting enough to buy or for some of us "were" interesting enough to buy. But now there's more at risk than wasting time deleting the junk or buying something we don't need. New phishing scam emails are being sent out advertising a "new", "great", "must have", product or service that most users see as nothing more than harmless SPAM mail. These messages however are not actually even spamming a legitimate product. They are advertising a phishing scam website that is designed to trick surfers into divulging personal and confidential information. Some of these scam sites require you enter simply credit card information, others request that you enter more confidential and potentially damaging information such as your: mailing address, physical address, social security number, bank account number, your banks routing number, drivers license number, mothers maiden name, city of birth, even such things as favorite pets name, city of birth, or the high school you graduated from. Though those last bits of information might seem trivial but to the identity thief they can be extremely useful.

To figure out why those are useful simply think back to the last time you logged into your banks web site or spoke with one of their representatives and managed your "security" question(s). That's right, many financial institutions use "trivial" information like this that "only you" would know to verify your identity. Using just a few bits of information that most surfers are unfortunatly all too willing to produce an identity thief has access to personal, confidential, and monetary information, and worse CONTROL over these things.

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