« Spamware at Download.com | Main | Big surge in spam from AOL »

January 31, 2005

Photoshop site hosts phishing scam

Usually, phishing scam artists stage their look-alike sites on obscure servers in the Far East or on hacked home PCs. But this morning, one phishing gang used a much more high-profile site to host their rip-off files: the home page of Photoshop World, a trade show put on by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals.

I received an email this morning claiming to be from Washington Mutual. It said that the bank wanted to give me a "special cupon" (sic) good for over 15,000 shops. To receive my coupon, I needed to log in to my account at Wamu.com, according to the email.

If you clicked the login link in the email, it actually took you to this page: http://photoshopworld.com/sessions/.wamu/index.html. The source code of the page there revealed it was copied from the official Wamu.com log-in page. (Sure looked like the real thing. Here is a screen grab.)

I'm sure I wasn't the only person to report the scam. But the bogus page stayed online for about five hours. (Right now, you'll get a Not Found error.)

Posted by brian at January 31, 2005 12:16 PM