[LINK] There is more to alcoholic dogs than you might think

[Rick Welykochy]

Hi Linkers,

Just received another phishing scam, purporting to be the bill collectors
from Telstra.

The provided link to "update my account details" ...

<http://www.alcoholicdogs.com/images/telstra.com.au/members/myaccount/LANGUAGE/ECareServ/ID12549JDk23/Online%20Billing.htm>

or

<http://tinyurl.com/dgss4u>

The page asks for a username and password (all comers allowed in) then
attempts to collect the usual suspect info, credit card, personal info.

The infected site is running PHP/4.4.9. Google digs up thousands
of pages discussing all sorts of exploits available for that version
of PHP, although that might not be the infection vector.

Looking at the home page <http://alcoholicdogs.com/> with cute
hammered pooches, one would guess that Wordpress is running the
site, which has prolly not been updated since July 2007. So, Wordpress
could be the infection vector as well.

However the miscreants did get into alcoholic dog world, what concerns
me is that this lame site, like many, is probably orphaned and unloved
almost two years after it was last attended to.

Is anyone morally or legally responsible for this sad and all too
common state of affairs in web land?

What can be done, if anything? Is there a phish reporting scheme
that attempts to contact the owner of the site and alert to them to
the break in? And would they even care? Would they clean up the
mess?

In a related category are the hundreds of millions of zombied PCs
on the 'Net. Nobody seems to be taking any responsibility for
these. Do their hapless owners ever get contacted to clean up their
act?

I do get attack emails from faked ISPs claiming that my own (Mac/Linux)
box is a zombie and it being used to transmit <insert heinous content
here> to the Internet. Of course, I've never seen a genuine email
to this regard.

I imagine that if I did get an email purporting to be from a phish
reporting agency that my website was being used for scams, I would
at first blush assume it was yet another scam. Sigh.

Thanks for listening on a quiet Saturday evening.


cheers
rickw






-- 
_________________________________
Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services

When someone declares they are a wiz at something, head for cover.