Phishing Threats: Hungarian hacker's phishing, data theft, blackmail and arrest

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Hungarian hacker's phishing, data theft, blackmail and arrest

Department of Justice arrested a Hungarian national who used phishing mails to break into the computers of Marriott Hotels Corporation. He stole sensitive company data and blackmailed Marriott Hotels into giving him a job under threat of exposure of sensitive data.
He sent malicious code in phishing emails to few Hotel employees and that gave him a backdoor entry to the Marriot network and computers to steal the company's sensitive data including financial information.
He was arrested by the US Secret Service who laid a trap to interview him for the job and flew him from Hungary to Washington DC.
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/November/11-crm-1534.html

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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.