Wednesday, June 3, 2009

More On Commonwealth Bank Phishing Seige

iTWire - Commonwealth Bank under siege by phishers

Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank, has been undergoing a series of phishing attacks that have gone from simple alerts of “banking errors”, through to chances of winning money, and now an attack that wants CommBank users to call a number and verify their details to a talking computer – but it’s all just a phishing scam!

Phishing scams targeting financial account holders, auction sites, social networking sites and other online accounts are nothing new, but the ferocity with which they are being thrown at account holders via spammed messages has only increased in both number and social engineering trickery.

The Commonwealth Bank, Australia’s largest, is but the latest to be re-attacked by heartless and greedy phishing criminals, who know only how too easy it is to catch the unwary that are too quick to believe the latest social engineering trick messages their email software delivers.

Although cyber criminals are attacking all manner of financial and other online organizations and their users on a regular basis, there has been a series of phishing episodes against the CommBank in the past few months.

Criminals could well be seeing an opportunity to take advantage of all the recent improvements that Commbank has made to its Internet banking websites, transaction tools and the introduction of voice recognition to try and catch people who will voluntarily giving up their account details and passwords into an online login form or a voice system that otherwise seems and/or sounds completely legitimate.

Editor's Note:  If online banking customers used our PCI 2.0 Certified Device to "swipe" their card and enter their PIN, then phishing would be eliminated.  No data is in the clear, (no phish in the see) so why would anyone stick their pole in?

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