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Date: Thu Jun 29 01:02:08 2006 From: n3td3v at gmail.com (n3td3v) Subject: Are consumers being misled by "phishing"? I believe the industry coined up "phishing" to make more money out of social engineering. Its obvious now that both are over lapping. Only the other day Gadi Evron was trying to coin up a phrase for "voice phishing". Why can't we cut to the chase and drop the (ph)rases and call it straight forward SOCIAL ENGINEERING. I believe your average single mom and retired couple will easily become confused if we keep throwing new catch phrase buzzwords at them. If we could just call it social engineering, then the world would be a less confusing place for the average social engineering vitcim. When Yahoo had "paydirect" (an online bank in partnership with HSBC, which was later dropped by Yahoo!) there was an exploit for obtaining account information you wanted from any Yahoo Account. So hundreds of script kids had this exploit which was released by hackers in the localised Yahoo security community. The technique was to get the account information via the web-based exploit in the Yahoo Paydirect service, then phone up Yahoo Customer Care and give them the account information, and hey ho, customer care sends you a new password. Around a hundred script kids were phoning customer care. I alerted Yahoo what was going on, but Yahoo Customer Care didn't stop accepting partial Yahoo account info in exchange for a new password. It was to be one of the biggest compromises of Yahoo accounts. Yahoo didn't fix the bug straight away, so it led to hundreds of accounts being compromised and never recovered. After this incident, and still to this day Yahoo Customer Care are easily socially engineered via the telephone if you offer them partial yahoo account information. (shocking) Point being, web-to-voice social engineering has been around forever, just a few smart guys are trying to coin a phrase, which is only going to confuse the mess that is "phishing". The name phishing should never have been coined, and I warn the industry not to add on anymore variants to the phishing term, which is in all means just social engineering. Phishing was a big mistake by the industry, now the last thing we need is "voice phishing" or any other (ph)rases... See comments section of: http://www.digg.com/security/Say_Hello_to_voice_phishing_2
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