Phishing - New Threat to B2B Websites

Think of one fisherman, trolling around the ocean, casting out his hooks with baits, and waiting for the fish to bite the lures... This scene could also be seen in the Internet world. The Internet scammers cast their baits-the copying webs on the net, in the hope that potential victims will click the malicious links or open the malicious attachments, in which case their financial information and passwords may then be stolen. This fishing phenomenon has its professional term of phishing, which is becoming more and more serious in Internet world nowadays.

According to the data from APAC, the accumulated identified and treated domestic phishing incidents in the first half year of 2011 is 54430, twice than that of the first half year of 2010. In addition, with the improvement of theft technology and fraud approach, the Internet scammers no longer only focus on those common webs such as payment transaction, financial securities, instant messaging, etc. Those B2B websites which need professional requirements are all becoming the main target of their attack.

Recently, one international e-commerce platform in chemical industry-LookChem, is troubled by phishing. On August 20th, LookChem's client Mr. Chen received an e-mail which contained the link with the name of LookChem. After he logined, he found out something different with the page he used before. Xiaoyi Zhou, the general manager of LookChem, knew about it and then found out that this site has the phishing pages from LookChem, both in style and in content. "If the fake phishing web do not have a more letter in the domain name, people will not notice generally", said Zhou. After the investigation of LookChem, they found that this phishing site is registered abroad, using the domain name similar to lookchem's, rented overseas server, and then copied the Web pages of lookchem through technical means. Through illicit phishing means, they could obtain the clients' information and their company privacy who trade on LookChem, so as to achieve the purpose of online fraud.

The phishing incident LookChem had just experienced is the caution light to the e-commerce world. If the phishing incidents are left to continue to spread, what will the e-commerce face in the developing road? This incident brings the sense of great insecurity to the majority of industrial web users, but also gives a warning to China's entire e-commerce industry. And now, we know that it is imperative to establish and improve the regulations of e-commerce and perfect the network monitoring mechanism.

According to Lookchem, they had sent lawyer’s letters to relevant companies and then reported to the supervision authorities of the govenment ministry. "Lookchem has taken much more secure technical measures to ensure that our users are not encroached by these Internet scammers, and we will also take legal means and any other possible approaches to fight against phishing incidents." said Zhou. At the same time, she called for the majority of peers to alert further and do the security better to prevent phishing effectively.

Beware of fishing website