Not content with the success of the Nigerian prince, Nigerian scammers have found a new way to rip off the gullible: Google Calendar. BitDefender sent out a press release today revealing that Nigerian scammers are using Google Calendar event invitations to suck people in. Tell your grandparents: if they receive an invite to a meeting about a massive inheritance, ignore it.
You can find the full release after the jump.
SYDNEY & AUCKLAND (19 March, 2008) – BitDefenderR, an award-winning provider
of antivirus software and data security solutions, announced today that
BitDefender antispam analysts have detected that Nigerian scam spammers are
using a new gateway to target the corporate world: Google Calendar.Nigerian scam spammers are targeting the corporate world by sending their
scam “hooks” as meeting invites in Google Calendar. The e-mails are
personalized, with a different link sent to each recipient, making URL-based
filtering harder.“This is a new and untried social engineering approach,” said BitDefender
CTO, Bogdan Dumitru. “The fact that these things are being spammed in huge
numbers is a bit odd – usually there is a testing phase, to evaluate the
response rate. Normally, after testing, some techniques are found
ineffective and never get used again. This one’s different.”The “Nigerian” scam works by informing the victim that they have inherited
or are otherwise due a large amount of money from an unlikely source. The
spammer then tells the victim to extract the payment in order to “set up the
delivery” of the said large sum. Google support has been notified to block
the accounts used in the scam.The new spam wave was detected early this morning by BitDefender antispam
analysts and is already added to the spam signatures base. BitDefender users
are guarded from this type of aggravation.