Advisories

SecureWorks Warns European Banks of Spam Related Scams

Banks in Belgium, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands should expect to receive extortion spam

By George Craciun, Security News Editor

1st of July 2008, 10:03 GMT

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According to information security company SecureWorks, there is a spam campaign targeted at financial institutions such as banks. The spam message threatens the bank that unless it transfers �10,000 to a certain account, the spammer will sell private information regarding 48,000 bank customers on the black market; he also threatens to inform the media about the situation. Similar spam messages have been detected in Spain, Germany and the UK. SecureWorks believes that US banks will soon be targeted as well.

This is how the whole thing works: you will receive a message entitled "we can have a deal" from someone called "qazda qazda". He informs you that private bank data on 48.000 customers has been successfully stolen. The spammer then sees only two possible outcomes: "1. I can upload all that information to popular Internet portals and it going to be widely available for using. Moreover I will send information about incident to popular news channels like CNN and EuroNews. A lot of newspapers can get this as well. I am sure that it will make negative effect and bring a lot of problems for your bank. However I have the second way. 2. We can have a deal if you translate 10.000 EUR on my account."

The second option seems to work better for the bank, as the stolen data will be deleted and the incident will not be leaked to the press. The spammer goes on to say that he has nothing to lose from all of this, but the bank does.

SecureWorks advises all financial institutions that receive such a message to report it to the authorities. The bank should not respond to the message and under no circumstances should it pay that amount of money. Even if the bank pays the �10,000 it is safe to assume that if the list exists it will be sold on the black market, where it is worth �1,000.

TAGS:

SecureWorks | spam | financial

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