Sex the Bait in Mass Orkut Compromise

With the advent of Web 2.0, social networking websites have become an easy target for online fraud and other identity scams. Lately, we have seen Twitter being used to phish out personal information, as well as MySpace scams and Facebook spams.

With more than 15 percent of the traffic from India, Orkut is perhaps the most popular and widely used social networking website in the country. Phishers have come up with an elegant approach to social-engineer the not so tech-savvy users on Orkut. They have updated the user profiles of several thousands of compromised Orkut accounts, which now link to various phished websites. These lure visiting users into divulging their personal information.

Various phished websites claim to be the “adult” variant of Orkut. The “Orkut Sex” site has been very successful in luring several thousands of Orkut users into entering their credentials into this fake website. The attackers use the harvested details to steal other personal information for monetary gain.

We have observed scores of websites being used in this phishing attack. Here are a few of them:

• http://orkutsexlogi[blocked].tk
• http://s3x[blocked].kilu.de
• http://orkutst[blocked].tk
• http://album[blocked].kilu.de
• http://priya[blocked].freehostia.com

If you have read this far, I probably don’t need to remind you to look carefully before you enter your personal details on the web. Always make sure that you are safe and protected–and keep away from the rip-offs.