Michael Dolan, a phisher who targeted AOL over the course of five years recently pleaded guilty to two criminal counts that the U.S. attorney’s office brought against him. The first count was a conspiracy to…

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Small Phisher is fried

Zulfikar Ramzan of Symantec writes that when Dolan was found he had private identification and credit information on 96 people. Dolan is characterized as a “small fry” in the phisher world, but a win nonetheless! Most large scale organizations have responsibility layers where different aspects fo the phishing scam from the acquisition of people’s information to the laundering of money are “outsourced” to different people. Dolan did it all himself, and that probably helped lead to his capture.

What is Phishing?

Phishing is when someone tries to trick you into giving them your highly sensitive personal financial information and then they rip you off. It is a form of identity theft.

What can we do?

Well, the best thing to do is stay ever vigilant. Always be suspicious of anything you do online. Always keep your anti virus and anti spyware and anti spam current with updates and on. In Dolan’s case he had a trojan, which is a hackers software program, which helped steal this information. Users thought they were giving their info to their institutions, when in fact they were giving the info to Dolan’s Trojan program that in turn sent the info to him.

It all sounds very spooky and you should not be frightened to death about this, but a healthy fear is good. You have 2 major defenses:

1. Technology like anti virus, anti spyware, anti spam and encryption.

2. Common sense: the key to almost all identity theft hacks is the use of social engineering or tricking people. Be smart. Be skeptical. And Be Safe.

Michael Rowles

Internet Hall Monitor