FBI director almost falls for online banking phishing scam
There are some very basic rules for venturing online, such as installing anti-virus software and a firewall, and keeping your wits about you at all times. But anyone can fall victim to a cleverly designed piece of malware or phishing scam. And I mean anyone. Even the director of the FBI isn’t immune, though his wife seems to be.
It seems that at every turn the Internet is an increasingly dangerous place to reside. Be it viruses, malware, trojans, or keyloggers, there are all manner of nasties you can fall foul of just by surfing the Web. And then there are phishing scams, cunningly designed to get you to impart personal details such as bank account numbers, passwords, and credit card information.
Some of these phishing scams can be very hard to spot, and you always have to err on the side of caution when giving away any details about yourself online. As if to prove this point, FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) director, Robert Mueller, has admitted he almost fell for a phishing scam. And this is the man in charge of multiple divisions whose sole job it is to catch criminals.
According to ComputerWorld, Mueller made the admission in a speech at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. He said:
[I was] just a few clicks away from falling into a classic Internet phishing scam. It looked pretty legitimate. They had mimicked the e-mails that the bank would ordinarily send out to its customers; they’d mimicked them very well.
After changing our passwords, I tried to pass the incident off to my wife … as a teachable moment. To which she deftly replied, ‘Well, it is not my teachable moment. However, it is our money. No more Internet banking for you.
Consequently, although Mueller considers online banking to be “very safe” he added that, “just in my household, we don’t use it.” That’s because his wife is clearly an intelligent woman who knows her husband cannot be trusted with money, especially when managing it online. The only plus point if he had fallen for the scam would be that he’d have had one of the best law enforcement agencies at his disposal to catch the perpetrators.
There’s clearly a comical side to this but it shows up a couple of important points. Firstly, that phishing scams are so widespread that anyone and everyone will probably be exposed to one at some point. And secondly, that anyone can (almost) fall for one. That’s because cyber-criminals are becoming increasingly cunning in the way they try to hook their victims.
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