New attack vector: "Man-in-the-phone" attacks.

Okay, maybe not new, but what a sexy marketing term for it. From the article:

The scam works like this: The criminal calls a target, claiming to be the fraud department of the target’s bank calling to alert the mark to potential unauthorized activity. The recipient of the call is then told to please hold while a fraud specialist is brought on the line. The perpetrator then calls the victim’s bank, and bridges the call, while placing his portion of the call on mute.

When the bank’s fraud department asks various questions in a bid to authenticate the victim, the criminal records the customer’s answers. Depending on the institution, the answers may include the victim’s Social Security number or national ID number, a PIN or password, and/or the amount of last deposit or location of the last transaction.

The criminal then calls the bank back (ostensibly reaching a different customer service representative), supplies the personal information needed to access the victim’s account, and begins to initiate a series of wire transfers out of that account into another that he controls.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/07/high_crimes_using_low-tech_att.html

Advertisement

~ by stevegoldsby on July 7, 2009.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.