Deutsche Bank hit again by phishing attack

Deutsche Bank AG was the target of a renewed phishing attack late Tuesday extending into Wednesday, after facing its first-ever reported assault last week, according to a bank spokesman.

Deutsche Bank AG late Tuesday was the target of a renewed phishing attack extending into Wednesday, after facing its first-ever reported assault last week, according to a bank spokesman.

“We were hit by another phishing attack last night but were able to respond quickly,” the spokesman for the German bank said Wednesday. “We blocked access to the pseudo Deutsche Bank Web site by 8:30 a.m. this morning. There was no damage done.”

Phishing attacks use spoofed e-mail and fraudulent Web sites to fool respondents into entering personal financial data such as credit card numbers, account user names and passwords, which can then be used for financial theft or identity theft. Usually, the bogus e-mail looks as if it came from a bank or payment service, requesting confidential account information for verification. Often, they threaten to discontinue service if the information is not provided.

Security researchers at German Internet security portal Heise Security detected phishing e-mail messages Tuesday night, according to Jürgen Schmidt, a security expert with Heise Security.

“We received several phishing e-mail messages addressed from support@deutsche-bank.de with the subject: security update,” he said. “Bank customers were told to click the link www.deutschebank-validate.info and provide their PIN and a TAN (transaction number) to verify their account.”

Schmidt said the text of the latest phishing attack was similar to that of the first one, but contained more grammatical errors. He was unable to confirm whether both attacks were launched by the same person or group of people.

“It appears as if the phishing e-mail messages came from PCs infected with a Trojan horse program,” Schmidt said.

Phishing attacks in Germany have grown – in both quantity and quality – over the past six months, according to Schmidt. “We are seeing not only more attacks but also more of these fraud e-mail messages and Web pages now written in German.”

Why Germany? “I believe the motive is not the country itself, but mainly the opportunity to perform a phishing attack,” wrote Mirko Zorz, a security expert with the Croatian Internet security portal net-security.org. “Phishing attacks are something waiting in any country worldwide.”