Phishers Target “Bloggers”

Trend Micro’s Web Reputation Services (WRS) Operations Team recently received a phishing email claiming to be from Blogger (see Figure 1), a free blog publishing tool from Google.

The spammed message instructed users to update their Blogger accounts by clicking the embedded link, which leads them to a fake login page. At first glance, the site’s URL seems legitimate enough. It began with the same domain name as the real Blogger login page. Upon closer examination, however, TrendLabs engineers found that the fake site was not really hosted on the same URL as the real one. It was, instead, hosted on a remote site, thus convincing them that this was indeed a fake login page or a phishing site (compare Figures 2 and 3).

Users basically use blogs as ongoing chronicles of information about anything and everything they are interested in. Some use blogs to promote their businesses or to show what their companies can do. Some use theirs as personal online diaries where they can save their thoughts and feelings in. Whatever use blogs may serve to users, however, signing in to and updating their account records on the bogus login page, will certainly allow phishers (continue reading...)