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Cyber crooks reinvent their attacks with parking ticket scam

Cyber crooks have come up with an innovative social engineering phishing scam that is designed to trick motorists in the US into visiting malware laden websites and compromising their online security.

The crooks are handing out fake parking tickets in North Dakota using windshield fliers containing a web address linked to a malicious website, according to Lenny Zeltser, an anti-virus analyst at the SANS Institute.

Once drawn in, the motorists are cajoled into installing fake anti-virus scanner packages and a spyware in the form of a browser helper tool for Internet Explorer.

"Attackers continue to come up with creative ways of tricking potential victims into installing malicious software," Mr Zeltser says in a web post.

"Merging physical and virtual worlds via objects that point to websites is one way to do this. I imagine we'll be seeing such approaches more often."

According to figures from managed security firm, Network Box, the US was the biggest virus distributor in January.

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