Beating Phishers the Old Fashioned Way
Tracking down phishers is difficult because they often hide behind botnets and spoofing techniques but one bunch of phishers was nabbed because of old fashioned paperwork. ComputerWorld is reporting Italian authorities arrested 26 in a scam involving the Poste Italiane, the Italian postal operator, which also provides financial services.
According to the story, the police were able to track the phishers by a paper trail:
But fraud management officials from Poste Italiane and the finance authority monitored transaction papers used to empty the accounts, initially in the Milan area and then throughout the country, they said.
It also helped that the victims, most of the phishers and the compromised computers used in the scam were all within Italy so no extra-jurisdictional issues arose.
This one set of arrests won't put a dent in phishing, in fact it will probably be a case study for how not to conduct a phishing scam. Still, this is as close to good news as we're getting these days in info security.
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