Category Archives: Phishing

Beware of Phishing E-mails from the Swedish Tax Office – (Spam) They never send e-mails

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Beware of e-mails from the Swedish Tax Office

A great number of Swedes has the latest days received e-mails (spam) from phishers with “click here to get your tax return immediately”. The aim of the bluffers is of course to obtain your bank account details and thereby get access to your account for fraudulent causes.
The Swedish Tax Authority (STA) released on its website yesterday a sharp warning for fraudulent attempts like this. STA calls for not to click on links in e-mails that seems to be coming from STA. “If it says that you should submit your bank account details och credit card numbers you should not do it. STA never asks for this information via e-mail or SMS. We only do this using our e-services and when you login via e-identification” adds STA on its website.
The fraudulent e-mails could appear differently. In one example, which STA has published on its website, the recipient is guided to “click here to get your tax return straight into your account”
Everyone who has submitted their sensitive information should immediately report to local police, the STA finishes.
Varning för skattebluff
Ett stort antal svenskar har de senaste dagarna fått mejl från nätbedragare med uppmaningar i stil med “klicka här för att få din skatteåterbäring”. Bluffmakarnas mål är att få mottagarna att fylla i kontouppgifter och på så sätt lura dem på pengar. Skatteverket gick under torsdagen ut med en skarp varning för bedragarna på sin hemsida. Myndigheten uppmanar medborgarna att inte klicka på länkar i mejl som ser ut att komma från Skatteverket men som ser misstänkt falska ut.
“Om det står att du ska lämna ifrån dig uppgifter om bankkontonummer eller kreditkortsnummer ska du inte göra det. Skatteverket efterfrågar aldrig dina kontouppgifter i mejl eller sms. Det gör vi endast via våra e-tjänster som du loggar in på med din e-legitimation”, skriver myndigheten på sin sajt.
Bluffmejlen kan se olika ut. I ett exempel på ett mejl som Skatteverket har lagt upp på sin hemsida används uppmaningen “klicka här för att få tillgång till formuläret för din skatteåterbäring”.
Den som har råkat fylla i kontouppgifter eller annan känslig information ges rådet att kontakta polisen.

 

Published Aug 22, 2014 in Dagens Industri – The leading business daily in Sweden, cited by SpamDrain AB (www.spamdrain.net)

Expert warns of insufficient virus protection

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There is an interesting article on viruses and filters in a Swedish newspaper today. Experts warn us that some filters are not efficient enough. They claim that some filters only catch 30% of the harmful e-mails. The reason for this being that the virus makers are quick at making new version and varieties of the code so it is hard to keep a traditional filter updated.
At SpamDrain we use artificial intelligence to continually refine the filtering process. This means that the filter can ‘learn’ what is spam and what is valid e-mail. The filter can therefore keep itself updated and quickly learn new tricks used by hackers to get their e-mails through spam filters.
This works quite nicely in Spamdrain when filtering spam and e-mail viruses. It would though be interesting to know if one could do something similar with desktop virus protection. I know that anti-virus companies have done some efforts in trying to “learn” the patterns of viruses and block viruses they don’t know about, but it’s unclear how well these techniques work.