Phishing in Google Calendar

Back in April, Elinor Mills, blogger at CNET News.com, highlighted spam that was utilizing Google Calendar. Mills referred to an experience that was observed by the SANS Internet Storm Center in which the content requested help to pay off $150 in nonresidential taxes in West Africa-Benin.

More recently, Mills notes an experience that Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped had with a phishing attempt made by way of Google Calendar.

The sender, “customer care,” referred to a legitimate event on Lenssen’s calendar. However, the text in the event description explained that Google was “having congestions (sic) due to the anonymous registration of Gmail accounts so we are shutting down some Gmail accounts and your account was among those to be deleted. We are sending you this email to so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account.”

Valerie Helmbreck at FinanceTechNews.com also noted recently that there is a noticeable rise in the number of phishing attacks targeting Google AdWords users during the past six months, according to Bigmouthmedia. These attacks attempt to hijack AdWords account login information. Not only does this pose a threat to the privacy and identity of the user involved, but it also leaves their traffic vulnerable to being channeled to the hijacker’s site.

Sources:</strong

http://news.cnet.com/newsblog/?tag=ne.tab.hd

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9927281-7.html

http://www.financetechnews.com/new-phishing-scam-google-adwords/