How to Foil a Phish

What happens after phishers strike? We provide an inside look at one midsize bank’s cutting-edge incident response plan.

One quiet Monday in July 2004, at the height of the summer vacation season, a call center representative at a midsize U.S. financial institution answered a peculiar call.
The customer on the line was suspicious of an e-mail she had received from the bank.

The e-mail contained a link to a website where the customer was asked to enter her debit card number, card expiration date, PIN and e-mail address. But the message was full of typos and grammatical errors, and it didn’t seem quite right for the bank to request that information.

The call set off a confused chain reaction. The customer forwarded the e-mail to the call center representative, who forwarded it to the call center manager. The manager sent it to someone in the online banking department, who forwarded it to her upper management and to the corporate security department. By the time the e-mail made its way to information security, there were several screens of forwarding information above the original message.

By Sarah D. Scalet

Full Story: http://www.csoonline.com/read/100105/phish.html