Sponsored by..

Thursday 6 November 2008

Stupid but sophisticated "Lloyds TSB" phish

Spammers are generally pretty stupid. This particular phish looks pretty normal to being with:

Customer Service department
Lloyds TSB Bank
September 26th, 2008


To all business and personal customers

We would like to inform you about recent change in Lloyds TSB terms and conditions of banking services. Lloyds TSB has updated terms and conditions for both business and personal customers. Each customer should read and accept current terms and conditions.
Failure to accept new terms and conditions may lead to blocking of current services. Such as loans, credit cards, online banking, savings accounts, bill payments. Take a moment to read through new terms and conditions. There are two convenient ways to request updated terms and conditions. You can request them by mail or use online banking to confirm the new terms of service. Please follow the link below to review and confirm updated terms and conditions.
www.lloydstsb.com/terms

Thank you for banking with the most trusted UK bank,
Lloyds TSB Customer Service Team

We know that this is a phish because a) it was sent to a harvested address and b) Lloyds TSB don't send out emails like this. So a typical next step would be to check the source code to find where the phishing site is.

So the only hypertext link in the document is to http://www.lloydstsb.com which is the real Lloyds TSB bank. A closer look shows an attempted image load from http://lloydstlb.com/images/logo_lloydstsb.gif which is the phishing site hosted on a botnet. The domain is registered to BIZCN.COM who seem to have taken over this sort of business from Estdomains.

The fake site looks pretty convincing.. even if no-one will click through to it.

The login screen looks authentic too.

The next step looks exactly like the genuine login. The "memorable information" prompt asks for 3 letters from a longer passphrase, specifically letters 1, 3 and 5.

But guess what, when you enter the information it tells you that you did it incorrectly and asks for letters 2, 4 and 6 instead. So now they have letters 1-6.

Blah blah blah..

But what's this at the bottom? Yup, more characters from the memorable phrase are needed..

Finally, a confirmation:
So, like many modern phishing sites the actually web site is very credible looking, even the domain name looks reasonable if you only glance at it. Fortunately for the intended victims, the idiots have messed up the spam and.. this time at least.. nobody will get this far.

1 comment:

DotMG said...

Either they are stupid, or, they chose a really confusing scam address, that they confused themselves... and wrote the good address instead of the fake... (lol)