Users of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail have had targeted attacks aimed at them similar to the attacks Google says have been directed at U.S. officials, political activists, and journalists who use Gmail, according to Trend Micro.
Google said earlier this week that it had disrupted a targeted phishing campaign against Gmail users that appeared to originate in China. The attackers were trying to monitor e-mails and use stolen passwords to change the settings in the accounts so that e-mails would be forwarded to their own accounts, Google said.
China has denied any responsibility and claims the U.S. is behind the "Internet war," according to The Associated Press.) Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating the Gmail attacks, officials told told CNET.
A Trend Micro blog post from yesterday says that Hotmail and Yahoo Mail users have separately been targets of similar attacks, in what appears to be a wave of attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in Web-based e-mail services.
"Trend Micro researchers in Taiwan revealed a phishing attack that exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft's Hotmail service. In fact, rather than clicking a malicious link, even the simple act of previewing the malicious e-mail message can compromise a user's account. This phishing e-mail pretended to be from the Facebook security team," the post said. "In addition to Gmail and Hotmail users, Yahoo Mail users have also been targeted. We recently alerted Yahoo of an attempt to exploit Yahoo Mail by stealing users' cookies in order to gain access to their e-mail accounts. While this attempt appeared to fail, it does signify that attackers are attempting to attack Yahoo Mail users as well."
Microsoft has fixed the issue with a security update, Trend Micro said in an earlier blog post.
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