Two of Germany’s biggest banks became the latest victims of phishing attacks last week as internationally organized criminal groups roam the globe seeking new targets, according to a spokesman at Postbank AG. Postbank suffered its second phishing attack on Thursday, less than four weeks after the bank’s first-ever assault, and was linked to a separate strike on Deutsche Bank AG.
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.
Until recently, most phishing attacks have been aimed at customers of banks in English-speaking countries, such as the U.S., U.K. and Australia, but “over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a shift to countries like Brazil and now Germany,” said Mikko Hypp