Spoofed White House Card Dupes Many Gov't Employees, Steals Data 173
tsu doh nimh writes "A run-of-the-mill malware-laced e-mail that spoofed seasons greetings from The White House siphoned gigabytes of sensitive documents from dozens of victims over the holidays, including a number of government employees and contractors who work on cybersecurity matters, writes krebsonsecurity.com. The story looks at several victims who fell for the attack, and suggests it may be related to a series of similar document-harvesting runs throughout 2010. Government security vendor NetWitness notes that these types of incidents are blurring the lines between online financial fraud and espionage attacks."
Read the victim list (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not so much the crime than the type of victims:
-An employee at the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyber Infrastructure.
-An intelligence analyst in Massachusetts State Police
-An unidentified employee at the Financial Action Task Force, [in a government body whose purpose is to fight] money laundering and terrorist financing.
-An official with the Moroccan government’s Ministry of Industry, Commerce and New Technologies.
Me, I'm an idiot with no influence, but the people who set policies and can put people in jail should know better.
Belarus (Score:3, Insightful)
This type of activity is illegal in Belarus too. The streets there do have names and houses are numbered. True, it is not in English.
Still if it was some kid, a call from the Interpol to Belarus police, and the employees probably could have they files back. Sometimes learning foreign languages at school could be very useful.