Interesting spear fishing type attack

[dninja at gmail.com (Robin Wood)]

On 9 March 2010 15:39, PJ Velasco <pjvela at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the guys I work with got an email from a person he used to know
> real well years ago. ?The email claimed that the person was stuck in
> the UK and needed money to come back home to the states. ?I thought
> this was an interesting angle. ?Identify and research your target (as
> usual), but instead of looking for current group memberships or
> vendors you search classmates.com or other reunion type social
> networking sites and craft an email using someone they used to go to
> school with. ?Obviously this did not work on my coworker, but I
> thought the list would find it interesting.

I heard this one as well, usually with people travelling in more
remote countries. It is fairly simple to drop a keylogger in an
internet cafe in a small village in somewhere like Thailand then use
the captured mail credentials to login in and send the mail to
everyone in the address book. Because the person is really there the
scam is more convincing.

Robin