- Jun 23, 2009
- 1,484
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Quote:
what happened wasn't that somebody released anything....... what happened is a hacker sent up a phishing site, and people tried to login to their hotmail, gmail accounts. Of course the site is put up too look like it is hotmail or gmail, and when you feed your login and password all it does is record for the Spammers to buy the list, and perpetuate spam from new names. Pretty slick and easy. Thats why myspace is one of the most spammed social networking site.
Phishing attacks like this have been going on forever, it's just about 10,000 people not paying attention got caught and now have to change their passwords.
For the record, Microsoft and Google were not hacked.
Close ... except that somebody did release something ... the hackers released the account info they'd stolen via the phishing sites you mention for account names starting with "a" or "b" as proof of what they had gotten their hands on ... presumably so that they could sell the data they'd stolen to the highest bidder.
The larger threat is that some people use the same password for multiple sites, so pity the poor fool who fell for the gmail phishing scam, gave out his password, and was using the same password for paypal or his/her bank. It's people like that who will get someone to pay top dollar to these hackers for the data the've phished up and are trying to sell.
what happened wasn't that somebody released anything....... what happened is a hacker sent up a phishing site, and people tried to login to their hotmail, gmail accounts. Of course the site is put up too look like it is hotmail or gmail, and when you feed your login and password all it does is record for the Spammers to buy the list, and perpetuate spam from new names. Pretty slick and easy. Thats why myspace is one of the most spammed social networking site.
Phishing attacks like this have been going on forever, it's just about 10,000 people not paying attention got caught and now have to change their passwords.
For the record, Microsoft and Google were not hacked.
Close ... except that somebody did release something ... the hackers released the account info they'd stolen via the phishing sites you mention for account names starting with "a" or "b" as proof of what they had gotten their hands on ... presumably so that they could sell the data they'd stolen to the highest bidder.
The larger threat is that some people use the same password for multiple sites, so pity the poor fool who fell for the gmail phishing scam, gave out his password, and was using the same password for paypal or his/her bank. It's people like that who will get someone to pay top dollar to these hackers for the data the've phished up and are trying to sell.
