Phishing Threats: Credit Cards of Xbox Live Users Stolen in Phishing Attacks

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Credit Cards of Xbox Live Users Stolen in Phishing Attacks

The Guardian, UK, reports on fraudulent credit card transactions in the accounts of users of Xbox Live, Microsoft's online gaming service. The users buy Mcrosoft Points for downloading games from EA Sports using their credit cards.

Hackers con people into giving away their account details through phishing attacks. They set up official looking websites purporting to give away free Microsoft Points, but insist on users to give their information including credit card info. It appears the hackers obtained Xbox Live user account details from EA Sports online gaming services. It is suspected theat EA Sports FIFA 12 servers were compromised earlier. The users detected the fraud when they scrutinized their credit card statements.

This is a case of hackers targeting online gaming.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/22/xbox-live-users-phishing-attacks?intcmp=239

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Phishing Threats

Computer users receive emails from their bankers or employers, or from utility companies or other institutions or organizations they deal with or even from friends on facebook or twitter, asking for updating their personal information by clicking on links provided in the mail. They take it for granted that these are genuine mails and in good faith click on the links. The phishers who are organized criminals redirect the users to malicious websites and harvest their personal information. The users ultimately become victims to identity theft, financial frauds and even more serious crimes leading to blackmail, murder, and so on.

Phishing attacks engineered by criminals through the medium of phishing emails ultimately lead to loss of consumer confidence in online transactions that include financial transactions and social interactions through Facebook and other social networking sites.

This is an attempt to survey the phishing threat landscape, to identify the criminal groups and their modus operandi and to understand the impact of phishing on online users.