Yahoo and Hotmail hit by Phishing attack

The hacking is said to be a success as the users of these two service providers have come under the attack.

This is not the first time when the hackers have targeted the email accounts successfully in the recent times. This is the second successful attack by the hackers on the email providers in the recent times. Earlier, a few weeks ago, internet giant Google also faced similar attacks when the hackers pierced their ‘Gmail’ service to gain access to the webmail accounts.

Senior researcher of Trend Micro, Nart Villeneuve in his blog post wrote that the Yahoo mail and Hotmail have been targeted by the hackers in similar but in separate attacks. He wrote that hackers were trying to gain access to webmail accounts just like they were doing when they attacked Gmail. They were doing that to monitor the communications of the web accounts and also to carry out future attacks.

Nart in his blog post also wrote that apart from phishing, the hackers were also looking to target political activities on Gmail. He said that the attack was similar to the attack which targeted the Hotmail service in Taiwan some time ago when Trend Micro discovered the attack.

Villeneuve said that Trend Micro has alerted Yahoo for the attack, in which hackers were trying to steal the cookies of the users to gain access in their mail accounts. However, that effort was failed but also highlighted that the Yahoo users were not safe.

Nart Villeneuve said, “These attacks can be difficult to defend against because these often appear to come from recognizable sources.”

He added, “However, there are some clues that can help identify phishing email messages. There are generally spelling and grammatical errors present in the messages that help indicate that it did not originate from the expected source.”