Phishing in Australia

What's happening here is something very well organized. Instead of scam messages being sent to everyone around the world, the scammers have limited themselves to Australia. This is quite an efficient tactic, since the content of the scam messages is bound to concern only Australians. What they are aiming at is Westpac's clients. This is the fourth largest bank in Australia and one of the largest banks in the southern Pacific. So, what the phishers are trying to do is obtain personal information from the bank's customers, and then hack their accounts, and of course, take out the money these accounts contain.

The days when hackers did something just to prove something to themselves or just to see their nicknames displayed somewhere, are long gone. Nowadays, they do it for the money, and this is just another phishing case. As according to Sophos, what might make their campaign of data phishing even more efficient is the fact that they are sending those e-mails only in Australia, and local spam volume is ten times larger than what has been seen in other spam campaigns.

This time, hackers are not exploiting a certain incident regarding banking services, but they have just invented a problem by themselves. The Sophos website displays what one of the hackers' messages looks like. They address the bank's customers and tell them that the bank had a hardware failure and some info has been lost. In order to avoid security problems, they need to review their database. What the hell? How come most e-mail-born spam campaigns include security issues that need to be fixed as one of the main subjects? This is just sick! Sometimes you don't know who to trust, and it's probable that when these threats will actually be real people will ignore them, thinking it's just spam... Anyway, to continue on how the e-mail looks like, it goes on by recommending the user to click on a link to avoid any possible upcoming problems.

Of course, clicking on the link is something you shouldn't do. There is nothing wrong now with Westpac's banking services, so if you do get this spam message, just ignore it.