Continued Targeted Attacks Against Personal Gmail Accounts

Via Contagio Dump Blog (Mila Parkour) -

I am posting this only to highlight the fact that once compromises happen and are covered in the news, they do not disappear and attackers don't give up or stop. They continue their business as usual. Here is a small update to the post dated Feb 17, 2011 Targeted attacks against personal accounts of military, government employees and associates. This post was mentioned a few times in the news thanks to Google mention in their blogpost in June 2011.

I received a phishing email sample indicating that the attackers described in the above post continue their efforts with a very slight modifications to the original themes and I must note that this incident is even more simple than the previous one. I don't know if any accounts were compromised this time, I hope the public disclosure of the previous attacks along with the notifications on Forward rules and two-factor authentication in Gmail helped prevent most if not all compromises.

P.S. Google are aware of this, there is not much they can do to prevent these from coming in but I am sure they are trying. If you are concerned about your account safety, please use two-factor authentication and change your passwords often.

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Excellent detailed update by Mila on the ongoing personal web-based e-mail attacks.

As Mila outlines, these attackers have purpose. While the media has moved on the the next "big story", these [persistent] attackers continue their targeted hacking campaign...grinding away to fulfill their objectives.