With the recent crisis of Northern Rock, customers of banks are in a general state of nervousness, wondering what bank will be next ? Generally, do they have to worry about where they have invested their money.

As customers may be in state of panic regarding their funds they may be prepared to do things they might not do otherwise to ensure their money is secure.

Over the last two weeks we have seen phishing emails playing on this fear by including statements “to assure you that your accounts and your assets are safe with us” and making all efforts to comply with the “requirements of the United Kingdom Financial Services Authority (FSA) “.

As of yet, we have not seen any phishing emails supposedly originating from Northern Rock, this email purports to be from HSBC Bank.

See below for the text of the phishing email.

Every week, we see the quality of the phishing email text and grammar improving, making phishing emails more believable
The email itself, is extremely well written and does not contain the usual spelling mistakes, making it harder for the readers to distinguish what is real and what is not.


AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO HSBC CUSTOMERS
Dear HSBC Bank Plc customer
I want to assure you that your accounts and your assets are safe with us,
and that we put the utmost value on our relationship with you.
As part of our efforts to meet the requirements of the United Kingdom
Financial Services Authority (FSA), we now ask all HSBC users to verify
their account information. It's a smart and simple way to add an additional
level of protection to your account.
Here's How it works :
* [1]Click here to securely log on.
* Complete our quick and simple form.
* Continue with your account session.

Issued for UK use only | © HSBC Bank plc 2002-2007


Get the bait out - it’s phishing season

At the start of July we saw an to end to World Cup and all that football fever, along with this, spam levelled off, and virus activity was low. With the launch of the Internet Defence Phishery this month, the quantity of phishing attacks is far easier to see than ever before. In the late July sun, the smell from the phishery, as well the temperature, was rising as a vast amount of new phishes came into the phishery to be processed [ed: I think she means that there was a massive volume of phishing emails sent out, targetting a number of instutitions in the last weekend of July].

The US is back at numero uno for spam, viruses and phishing emails. Bleh.

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Phew. I got back from my holiday - a lovely cruise on the adriatic, to find that the sea had been following me home. Well, judging from the amount of phishes that started last weekend, it felt like it. For a time, nearly every spam was a phishing email. A real torrent. I’ll let a picture tell the story:
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With a nasty grinding and crunching of over-used metaphors, the shiny new Internet Defence PhishTank has been pushed out of the laboratory, and is now on full display at http://phishery.internetdefence.net.

What is the phishery?

The Phishery is a real time, automated, device to capture and display Phishing Emails. And to keep a tab on what phake logon sites the phishermen are actually using. Phew, that’s got the surpheit of “Ph” out of the way!
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World Cup Crazy

With any worldwide event, security precautions increase, and people are on high alert, as you would expect an increase in malicious activity. In Germany, security professionals held their breath, especially the World Cup network operators as the football matches began.
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Bank Holidays?

May has definitely not been as drab and dreary as showery April. Although the overall view of spam, ham and viruses has not altered extremely, it is the breakdown of each of these which is interesting; the amount of ham seen has decreased from last month by ~3%, with spam gaining this percentage. Phishing activity is continually increasing, but we haven’t seen anything of much excitement. It’s also been a while since we have seen a new virus in the wild - but with May we have seen a change - a new virus and its several variants were detected between the middle and end of the month.
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April Showers

April, usually a dull, grey month, in between Winter and early Summer. And the Spam report for this month, is much like the weather. After the excitment of the Winter’s WMF exploit, and the corresponding upsurge in spam, unsolicited email has been coming along in a steady deluge. Read on for an overview of the key trends and highlights in email attacks and spam sending for the month of April.
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Phishing and scamming methods are becoming increasingly sophisticated. They are using the latest software vulnerabilities to exploit systems and social engineering techniques to hack people. IT allows more potential victims to be targeted, at a lower cost to the attacker, than traditional methods of confidence trickery. Before the advent of the web, faxes were used with similar techniques to scam people.
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Introduction

Welcome to the March edition of the InternetDefence Ham, Spam & Virus Report.
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Introduction

Welcome to the February edition of the InternetDefence Ham, Spam & Virus Report.
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