How To Protect Yourself From Phishing Scams

By: Nadia_Kovacs            Posted: 30-Sep-2014 | 10:16AM 

October is National Cyber Security Awareness month. Phishing is one of the oldest tricks in the Internet book that tries to trick you out of divulging your personal information. This is part 4 in a series of blog posts we will be publishing on various topics aimed at educating you on how to stay protected on today’s Internet landscape.

Phishing is essentially an online con game and phishers are nothing more than tech-savvy con artists and identity thieves. They use SPAM, malicious web sites, email messages and instant messages to trick people into divulging sensitive information, such as bank and credit card accounts, usernames and passwords.

How Do You Know It’s A Scam?

There are different forms of phishing tactics. Criminals may try to trick you into giving away your personal information via emails, Social Media messages, IMs, text messages, and even Internet chat rooms. Sometimes criminals may try to fool you into installing a malicious program, known as spyware, which can track and record the information you enter into your computer. Below are some of the commonly used tactics and warning signs you should be on the lookout for:

• Phishers, pretending to be legitimate companies, may use email to request personal information and direct recipients to respond through malicious websites. Phishers have been known to use real company logos, and will also use a spoofed email address, which is an email address that is similar to the actual company’s address. However, the address may be misspelled slightly or come from a spoofed domain.
• Emails may come in the form of a help desk support ticket, a message from your bank, or from someone soliciting money via a 419 scam.
• Phishers tend to use a call to action. You may get a notice that an account is being shut down and you need to log into it to avoid that from happening. They may also request personal information in order to verify your identity.
• Phishing websites can look remarkably like legitimate sites because they tend to use the copyrighted images the original sites.
• Fraudulent messages are often not personalized and will often have misspellings of words and company names.

How Do You Know If You Have Spyware?

Spyware can be downloaded from web sites, email messages, instant messages, and from direct file-sharing connections. Additionally, a user may unknowingly receive spyware by installing a software program, and the spyware piggybacks onto that installation as additional suggested software. Users may also be unaware that some browser add-ons contain spyware.

Spyware frequently attempts to remain unnoticed, either by actively hiding or by simply not making its presence on a system known to the user. However, sometimes there can be signs that you may be infected:

• Your computer starts to run slower than usual.
• You start to receive an unusual amount of pop up ads.
• There are new toolbars on your browser that you did not install.
• Your browser’s home page has changed to a page that you are unfamiliar with.
• Your web searches become redirected to other spam sites.

How Do I Avoid Spyware?

• Be selective about what you download to your computer.
• Watch out for anti-spyware scams.
• Beware of clickable ads.
• Use Norton Security to provide anti-spyware protection and proactively protect from other security risks.
• Do not accept or open suspicious error dialogs from within the browser.
• Spyware may come as part of a "free deal" offer - do not accept free deals.
• Keep software and security patches up to date.

How Do I Protect My Privacy?

If you happen to run across any of these red flags, here are some tips to keep yourself safe and protect your privacy:

• Never give out any personal information via email, social media platforms, text messages or instant messages.
• If the call to action is to click on a link and sign into the site with your username and password, never click on the link. Instead, go to your web browser and type in the website’s URL. Be sure to look for the verified https:/ at the beginning of the URL in the task bar.
• Never download a program or file from a suspicious email. These may contain programs such as spyware and keyloggers.

How Can You Help?

Please contact the Symantec Security Response team if:

• A legitimate web page has been misidentified as a known or suspected phishing site.
• A phishing site has not been properly identified.

This is part 4 of a series of blogs for National Cyber Security Awareness Month (link is external).

For more information on various topics, check out:
5 Ways You Didn't Know You Could Get a Virus, Malware, or Your Social Account Hacked
How To Choose a Secure Password
How To Avoid Identity Theft Online
How To Protect Yourself From Cyberstalkers

Avoid using Instagram on public Wi-Fi...

A configuration problem in Facebook's popular Instagram application for Apple devices could allow a hacker to hijack a person's account if they're both on the same public Wi-Fi network.

Stevie Graham, who describes himself as a "hacker at large" based in London, wrote on Twitter that Facebook won't pay him a reward for reporting the flaw, which he said he found years ago.

Graham wrote he hopes to draw more attention to the issue by writing a tool that could quickly compromise many Instagram accounts. He cheekily calls the tool "Instasheep," a play onFiresheep, a Firefox extension that can compromise online accounts in certain circumstances.

"I think this attack is extremely severe because it allows full session hijack and is easily automated," according to Graham's technical writeup. "I could go to the Apple Store tomorrow and reap thousands of accounts in one day, and then use them to post spam."

Graham's finding is a long-known configuration problem that has prompted many Web companies to fully encrypt all connections made with their servers. The transition to full encryption, signified by "https" in a browser URL bar and by the padlock symbol, can be technically challenging.

Instagram's API (application programming interface) makes unencrypted requests to some parts of its network, Graham wrote. That poses an opportunity for a hacker who is on the same Wi-Fi network that doesn't use encryption or uses the outdated WEP encryption, which can be easily cracked.

Some of those Instagram API calls transmit an unencrypted session cookie, or a data file that lets Instagram know a user is still logged in. By collecting the network traffic, known as a man-in-the-middle attack, the session cookie can be stolen and used by an attacker to gain control of the victim's account.

Facebook officials didn't have an immediate comment, but Instagram's co-founder, Mike Krieger, wrote on Ycombinator's Hacker News feed that Instagram has been "steadily increasing" use of full encryption.

Its "Instagram Direct" service, which allows photos to be shared with only small groups of people, is fully encrypted, he wrote. For more latency-sensitive endpoints, such as Instagram's main feed, the service is trying to make sure the transition to https doesn't affect performance, he wrote.

"This is a project we're hoping to complete soon, and we'll share our experiences in our [engineering] blog so other companies can learn from it as well," Krieger wrote.

Google offered full encryption as an option for Gmail in 2008, but two years later made it the default. Facebook switched it on by default in January 2011

Jeremy Kirk (IDG News Service) on 29 July, 2014 15:47

Source: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/551120/using_instagram_public_wi-fi_poses_risk_an_account_hijack_researcher_says

¿Qué tienen en común un phishing y una imagen?

Recientemente hemos recibido en el Laboratorio de Investigación de ESET Latinoamérica un phishing del banco BBVA, al cual se accedía desde un correo en Perú. Aunque ya hemos visto casos parecidos en Argentina, España y también en Chile, este nos llamó la atención y procederemos a describirlo en detalle, porque estaba compuesto pura y exclusivamente por imágenes. Esto significa que no contenía archivos de programación HTML ni PHP; no tenía trabajo de programación web alguno, sino que sólo eran imágenes.

Antes que nada, debemos aclarar que no hay una vulnerabilidad en el sitio oficial, solo es una réplica exacta creada con imágenes y pequeños programas que se encargan de robar la información. Aquí cabe destacar que estas entidades financieras y demás servicios de Internet intentan acabar con estos sitios de estafas para proteger a los usuarios, por lo que estas campañas exceden a las empresas.

Por eso, queremos mostrarles el funcionamiento de este tipo de estafas, para que desde sus hogares puedan detectarlas sin la necesidad de conocimiento técnico.
La trampa que hoy analizamos estaba destinada a robar información de usuarios y empresas. A continuación mostramos una captura del correo que recibía la víctima:

Buscando en el cuerpo del mensaje llegamos a ese recuadro gris donde se encuentra el cursor, donde se encuentra el botón para acceder al enlace malicioso (por algún motivo no aparece el botón pero sí permite acceder al enlace).

Una vez que se accede a ese sitio fraudulento, la víctima se encontrará con el siguiente portal:


Al hacer clic en la solapa “Persona” y luego en el botón de color verde (botón llamativo a la derecha), el portal invita a la víctima a ingresar con su número de tarjeta y su clave personal. En la siguiente captura se aprecia el modo de ingreso:


Debemos destacar que se podía acceder ingresando cualquier número de tarjeta y cualquier contraseña, mientras que una entidad oficial verifica el número de tarjeta y comprueba la contraseña; también cabe remarcar que después de algunos intentos fallidos de ingreso, el usuario es bloqueado. Un detalle que se puede apreciar en la primer pestaña: la letra “V” de la entidad está compuesta por barra y contra barra (\/), formando una V.

Una vez dentro de la supuesta cuenta, el sitio comenzará a solicitar información personal sensible, aparte de la información bancaria, tal como se observa en la siguiente captura:


Como puede verse en el ejemplo, solicita número de documento o identificación, teléfono móvil, ciudad, dirección y también fecha de caducidad. Pero algo interesante para prestar atención, es el código ATM de 4 dígitos que solicita, es decir que también pide la contraseña para acceder desde un terminal (cajero automático).

Una vez completados los datos solicitados (en este caso con datos al azar), se procede a hacer clic en el botón “Continuar”, para procesar el formulario.

Como si todo esto no bastara, el sitio no posee SSL, por lo que no vemos “HTTPS” en la barra de direcciones. Esto significa que al capturar la comunicación entre el equipo de la víctima y el sitio en cuestión, se puede ver cómo toda la información viaja sin cifrar:


Como habrán visto, es necesario tener todos estos detalles en cuenta, los cuales bastarán para prevenir este tipo de fraudes sin tener conocimientos técnicos.

Desde el Laboratorio de Investigación de ESET Latinoamérica les recomendamos ser precavidos con este tipo de correos electrónicos, estos enlaces suelen ser engañosos y prácticas como pasar por encima de un menú sin que cambie el cursor, sin poder acceder a estos, puede ser un gran indicio de que se está simplemente frente a una imitación de la imagen de un sitio bancario y no tiene nada que ver con el sitio oficial.

A la hora de hacer consultas u operaciones de home banking recomendamos acceder al sitio oficial a través de sitios seguros con HTTPS. Afortunadamente, en el transcurso del análisis, el sitio fue dado de baja en el servidor donde estaba alojado, por lo cual ya no afectará a más víctimas. Pero no queríamos pasarlo por alto, para que vean lo simple que es detectar una estafa a tiempo.

Créditos imagen: ©palindrome6996/Flickr

Autor Ignacio Pérez, ESET