phishing attacks against ISPs (also with Google translations)

Wed Mar 25 13:55:40 UTC 2009

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 7:38 AM, Gadi Evron <ge at linuxbox.org> wrote:

> In this email message I'd like to discuss two subjects:

That makes one of us,

> b. Phishing in different languages against ISPs as soon as Google adds a
> new translation module.
>
> In the past few weeks there has been an increasing number of phishing
> attacks against clients of Israeli ISPs. I've only seen a few of these,
> but the local ISPs confirm it's happening across the board.

Confirmed. Not more than two days after google added its /intl/xx-bork/
translation site, my best friend, (he's Swedish - a high profile Chef), told
me he was scammed out of thousands of dollars by someone on the internet
that he didnt know.  (actually  his words were "Eye lost all mee moolah on
der webs!  Its der Googol web-en page-en!  Eye don know whatta think-a, bork
bork bork!").
..
On a more serious note, how does this relate to network operations?

> In all these cases, the phishing email is in Hebrew.  While we have seen
> ISP phishing and Hebrew phishing before, these
> attacks started when Google added translation into Hebrew.

Since at the time Google added Hebrew translations, they also added

   1. Vietnamese,
   2. Slovak,
   3. Serbian,
   4. Catalan,
   5. Filipino,
   6. Indonesian,
   7. Latvian,
   8. Lithuanian,
   9. Hebrew, and
   10. Ukranian,

Any reasonable person might assume that your 1/11th of new languages would
make up a little less than 100% of what is probably hand-picked "data".

Your data, or, to wit, your attempts to link Google and Phishing, need(s)
some work.

And by "needs some work" one might mean "are full of fail, try again later"

Is this a trend? Have other countries (or populations) been targeted
> when Google added a translation module for more languages?

^^ Insert blatant attempts to get unfounded interviews with clueless media
here. ^^

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