Iowa Telecom battles phishing scam targeting e-mail users
The Fourth of July weekend wasn't such a carefree holiday for many Iowa Telecom technicians and their customers.
The company's e-mail network was inflitrated by one of a growing number of "phishing" schemes in the form of unsolicited e-mails, which gave the appearance of being messages from Iowa Telecom asking for confirmation of accounts through requests for changed e-mail passwords.
The result was a series of e-mail delays and e-mail blocks because of heavy spammer activity.
"We are working diligently to get e-mai flow back in normal order, but understand this is like a snowball rolling downhill," said Iowa Telecom technician Jeff McDermott in a message to fellow network security employees on July 6. "It usually gets bigger before it stops!"
Fortunately, by July 7 e-mail messaging was back to normal for Iowa Telecom customers. But, it was a significant problem, and one that become widespread if customers of any network reply with the requested information.
"Anything longer than an hour is significant to us," said Dan Eness, media relations specialist with Iowa Telecom. "But I'm sure a lot of people didn't realize anything was going on. We did a lot of internal work and investigating, and communicated with domains that had blocked us as a protection against the scam. The best defense against a scam like that is to not respond, and delete the e-mail."
Public 'baiting'
Phishing is a term used for these scams because it resembles "fishing" in alluding to baits used to "catch" financial information and passwords, and also related to "phreaking," which is a slang term describing exploration of telecommunication systems.
Most phishing schemes in unsolicited e-mails contain phrases like "we need to confirm your account, please click here." However, the link leads users to a false Web site, and then prompts them to provide personal information such as passwords, addresses, Social Security numbers and credit card data.
The "phishers" then use the information to commit identity theft, and criminal activity such as false bank accounts, fraudulent loans and credit card activity.
All it takes is one response and the "phishers" have someone hooked with potentially lucrative financial information to use in these schemes.
Eness said Iowa Telecom and other telecommunications companies are constantly on the lookout for phishing schemes and others containing computer viruses.
"Part of the way to combat something from growing is by informing people," Eness said. "We do billing messages and educational updates on our Web site."
That site is security.iowatelecom.net. It is a public information forum listing any current virus or scam alerts.
Customers receiving a suspicious e-mail can also forward it to spam@iowatelecom.
"In many cases we're already aware of it," Eness said, "but it's good for us to see what's out there, and how widespread it is."
Virus scams
Virus scams can attack a computer when someone opens an attachment.
"There's a cat and mouse element to it," Eness said. "There's a criminal subset trying to outdo each other by seeing how many computers or locations they can disrupt.
"It all comes down to this," Eness added. "Study after study has shown that the number one problem is not system weaknesses, but human error — people responding to these things. Internet-related security problems will persist for the foreseeable future, but we know it can be diminished by the behavior of the computer owner. That's why we take education seriously. You can defend yourself by not responding."
The recent Iowa Telecom scam asked customers to respond with a new password needed because of network upgrades, and that failure to do so would result in deactivation of their account from the network database.
Eness stressed that Iowa Telecom and other related companies do not have a practice of asking for sensitive information such as passwords through an e-mail response.
"First of all, we already have that information," Eness said. "Never respond to an e-mail asking for your account information, or personal information whatsoever."
