What the hack?

Sep 28, 2007 13:50 GMT  ·  By

Evil hackers are doing damage in two ways now. They've got to be insane to do this. Luckily, security experts know better. So, you're probably wondering what I'm yapping about. Well, hackers involved in phishing attacks have been using a Chinese government server, as the Inquirer informs. This is huge - it could mean two things: either hackers are in control of the server or someone at the dot GOV dot CN site is involved in phishing (not likely, in my opinion).

Most probably they are really phishing data, for them to later use it to gain profits out of this. It might be just a classical phishing attack. However, I suspect something more. This is just a hunch of mine and there are no facts to point this out, but here it goes: China has been in the news lately for its hackers that are damaging other countries' government computers. Could this be the (sloppy) work of a hacker that means to incriminate the Chinese government for the earlier attacks? However, this is just a wild guess, so don't go panicking, thinking the Chinese government launches attacks against other countries.

However, the phishing attack was nothing special. Just a common e-mail based one. You've read about these many times before, so I'm going to make it brief. When you open the e-mail you receive a notice that there has been some meddling with your PayPal account and that you need to log in and follow a number of steps, to set things straight. A link in the e-mail would take you to the government site. In case you want to take a look at the more techie details, you may follow this link.

I hope that this issue will be solved as fast as possible, as even though journalists are telling people how to stay secure almost every day, a lot of them still aren't paying attention to their own security.