Phishers have your bosses’ password

FRIDAY'S Wall Street Journal explained to top management what they could have found out by asking their teenagers. You had better be careful when you click on a link in an email. Because you may be opening your computer to downloading a key logger application which runs undetected in the background.

Anti-virus firm TrendMicro says that one in six PCs harbor dodgy utilities. So a lot of blokes & bloketes have opened their computer's “back-door” and said in effect; 'come on in I want to give everything away'. Trend's claims are based on scan reports from nearly 4 million PCs that used their HouseCall online scanning service between 1 January and 1 September 2007.

Hackers are equal opportunity thieves: The online gaming world has been besieged by malware which grabs the credit card info when users log in. Last year the USA's fourth-largest online broker, E-Trade Financial Corp., said that "concerted rings" in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia cost their customers $18 million in losses during the third quarter of 2006.

Now top executives of Fortune 500 companies are targeted for their big wonga credit cards says Joe Stewart of Atlanta-based Secureworks to the WSJ writer. In May of this year the global sales manger of Air2Web got an email from what he thought was the Better Business Bureau (whose trademarked logo is “Start with Trust”) . The email to Scott Foernsler was about a supposed customer complaint complete with case number and one of those “convenient links”.

Being a caring executive who wants satisfied customers, Scott dutifully clicked on said link. Soon another email arrived saying the supposed complaint was resolved. What Mr. Foernsler didn't know was that by clicking on the “convenient link” he downloaded malware with a nasty key logger hidden inside. So everything Mr. Foernsler keyboarded and mouse clicked was passed along to a hacker's server. All of Scott's important stuff like; passwords, credit card numbers, banking information, user names – zowwy wowwy, those were the “keys” to his whole electronic world!

The WSJ article goes on to explain in-depth what your bosses should be doing on their computers. Same stuff corporate IT departments, along with anti-virus & anti-malware vendors, are telling all of us.

As Sergeant Phil Esterhaus used to say on Hill Street Blues: “Hey, let's be careful out there.” µ