Phishing: A Unique Cat & Mouse Game

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I recently posted about the MySpace phishing experience I had, so while on that train of thought I will go over two interesting phishing letters I've seen. The first one started off as a standard phishing email stating the fact that my account was limited. When I clicked the link it was a new way of phishing that I had never seen before. It linked to a domain "www.removefraud.org" with a paypal template page saying the page has been moved.

Now at first I thought there was a company called "Remove Fraud" who put up this template over a phishing site, and the link would link to the real paypal site. However looking closer at the page you can see the copyright is set for 2005. That's pretty much a dead give a way. When clicking the link you're redirected to a phishing page which in firefox takes the address bar out of the browser.

Click the image for the full screen. Pretty sneaky, might fool even some users that are educated about phishing. GMail is taking the links out of phishing pages, so if they send a link to http://phisingsite.com but the text is to appear www.paypal.com GMail will remove the hyperlink and give the text they entered. So when I got a phishing letter with a form posting to the phishing site I was surprised.

Pretty good idea. Phishing is just a cat and mouse game. When users get more protection/smarter the phisher's tactics evolve and they come out with new ideas to weasel people out of money.

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