American Express phishing attempts

[Petrovic]

Content source

http://myonlinesecurity.co.uk/american-express-phishing-attempts/

We are seeing quite a few American Express phishing attempts trying to get your American Express details. These are very well crafted and look identical to genuine American Express emails. The senders appear to be from American Express until you look carefully at the email headers. They are using literally hundreds if not thousands of hijacked websites to perform these attacks. The site listed in the email is the first step in the chain and you are bounced on to other sites. The coding on the primary hijacked sites suggest that they are under the control of the Blackhole and Angler exploit kit criminals. This means that at any time when they have taken stolen enough identities and money, they will switch to spreading malware via the same network and emails. Do not click any links in these emails. Hover your mouse over the links and you will see a web address that isn’t American Express. Immediately delete the email and the safest way to make sure that it isn’t a genuine email form American Express is to type the American Express web address in your browser. and then log in to the account that way.

There are currently 2 main avenues of the American Express phishing attempts:

Subjects are:

• Important: Personal Security Key
• Irregular card activity

Both appear to come from American Express no-reply@welcome.aexp.com

Following the link in these takes you to a website that looks exactly like the real American Express site. You are then through loads of steps to input a lot of private and personal information. Not only will this information enable them to clear out & use your American Express account, but also your Bank Account, Email details, webspace ( if you have it) They then want enough information to completely impersonate you and your identity not only in cyberspace but in real life.

All of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email or follow links in them . Whether it is a message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” and it appears to come from a friend or is more targeted at somebody who regularly is likely to receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day. Or whether it is a straight forward attempt, like this one, to steal your personal, bank, credit card or email and social networking log in details.Be very careful when unzipping them and make sure you have “show known file extensions enabled“, And then look carefully at the unzipped file. If it says .EXE .SCR or .COM then it is a problem and should not be run or opened.
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