More often than not I read about scams that are being rolled out against people to relieve them of their hard earned cash. Online scams flourish at a dizzying pace and now we find a new variation on the tried and true phishing attack.
Coupons.
Yes, that’s right, coupons.
From MSNBC:
Instead of moneysaving deals, e-mailed coupons could lead recipients into “phishing” schemes where the consumer is redirected to a copycat site, whose real purpose is to siphon the user’s credit card information, passwords and other financial data, IBM Corp. security executive Christopher Rouland warned.
“That 50-percent-off, one-use coupon could go to a compromised computer in Kazakhstan,” said Rouland, chief technology officer for Internet security systems at Big Blue, which controls more than 1 million “phish trap” e-mail addresses that discovered 867,000 scams in the third quarter. “The quality of malware is very high.”
IBM is urging online shoppers not to click on links within e-mails that appear to come from an online retailer. Instead, open a new Web browser, go to the retailer’s site, navigate to special coupons or promotions and see if it’s there.
It never fails to amaze me the depths to which phishers will sink.
