Crime syndicates target SA (Independant Newspapers: http://www.tios.co.za/?fArticleId=4066399) October 06, 2007 Edition 1Babington MaravanyikA

SOUTH African e-mail users are coming under unprecedented attack by organised crime syndicates masquerading as banks, in an attempt to trick them into divulging their confidential banking details.

And the bad news is that there isn’t much the police can do to arrest the fraudsters since they open their websites, using fake identities, often through overseas-based internet service providers.

The con artists have developed new technology that has enabled their “phishing” e-mails to evade sophisticated anti-spam software, said an executive of a leading anti-virus software company.

The crime syndicates, which are mostly based overseas, are sending millions of phishing e-mails to South Africa, according to Justin Stanford, the chief executive officer of Eset Southern Africa, which markets the NOD32 antivirus system. The number of phishing e-mails aimed at South Africans and evading all sophisticated filters had increased dramatically over the past few weeks.

The mails, purporting to be from most of South Africa’s major banks, generally had very good copies of the banks’ actual websites and included genuine phone, fax and e-mail details.

While some of the phishing syndicates were based in South Africa, most operated from countries like the Philippines, Russia, Indonesia and the US, and are posing a major challenge to anti-virus and anti-spam software developers.

“…they (the syndicates) always try hard to come up with new technology to beat existing anti-virus software,” Stanford said.

He said phishing messages did not contain malicious software (viruses) in themselves, as their sole purpose was to defraud by illicitly obtaining PIN numbers and passwords.

Read the full article here: http://www.tios.co.za/?fArticleId=4066399