RIO DE JANEIRO – A recent phishing attack aimed at Brazilian Hotmail users has resulted in the loss of more than eight thousand user names and passwords over a six day period. The theft was first reported in a study just released by security firm ESET South America which detailed how the scam worked, reports terra.com.
According to the study, the hackers redirected users to a fake Hotmail page where users, thinking they were on the official site, entered their credentials which were then harvested by the hackers who used the hijacked accounts to send out spam blasts to all of the users' contacts.
The hackers, once they controlled the Hotmail accounts, sent out an unknown number of spam emails. If a recipient opened the email, which promised images of Amy Winehouse's death or videos of President Rousseff, their computers would become infected with malicious code that would allow the hackers to gain access to it.
The security firm also conducted an analysis of the passwords that had been harvested from the users. Half of the passwords were numerical sequences, such as “123456.” The other half were words or letter combinations as simple as “jesuschrist,” “godislove” and “judy.” The company warns that using only simple combinations with numbers or letters is a serious security flaw.
”Strong passwords require a combination of letters, numbers and special characters,” said the statement from ESET.
Read also: More Articles from Brazil Dispatch
Brazilian online news source for this article: terra.com.br
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