Salesforce.com Warns Customers Of Phishing Scheme

A Salesforce.com employee was tricked into disclosing a password, providing the phisher with information on a customer contact list.

Those were the headlines this week.

With Software on-demand on the rise, and the “All You Need is a Browser and an Internet connection” sales pitch, bad things can happen. Just remind yourself and your 9 year old daughter surfing the Internet unattended.

By now, we have all received emails coming from PayPal, eBay, and even major Banks asking you to log in and verify your account. If you don’t have a Citibank account asking for information, that smells like a “phish”. But what if you do?

What if your entire Sales database is “behind that browser” and you get that “security email” with the same look and feel interface? At first glance, it would be hard to detect it on the email.

Sure, both Firefox and IE7 has anti-phishing features. I’ll be giving some great tips on using Firefox in an upcoming article.

Here is the full article of the Salesforce.com employee being tricked into disclosing a password.

A Salesforce.com employee bit on the bait of a phisher, and now the Web-based CRM software provider is warning customers not to fall for the same cybercriminal tricks.
On its Trust.Salesforce.com Web site this week, Salesforce.com posted a “letter about security” to customers alerting them to be cautious of “phishing and malware scams on the Internet,” which are on “the rise.”

In fact, the company revealed that a Salesforce.com employee had been a recent victim of a phishing scam that tricked the worker into disclosing a password, providing the phisher with information on a customer contact list. That contact list information included “first and last names, company names, e-mail addresses, and telephone numbers for Salesforce.com customers and related administrative data” belonging to Salesforce.com, according to the letter.

The letter, which was signed by Salesforce.com executive VP Parker Harris, also revealed that “a small number” of Salesforce.com customer users subsequently have become victims of a phishing — being fooled into disclosing passwords after receiving “bogus e-mails that looked like a Salesforce.com invoice but were not.”

In addition, “a few days ago, a new wave of phishing attempts that included attached malware — software that secretly installs viruses or key loggers — appeared and seemed to be targeted at a broader group of customers,” the company disclosed in the notice.

“That’s why we warned our system administrators last week of this new, more malicious phish and why we are sending this letter now with the goal of increasing awareness.”

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About Jimson Lee
Jimson is a freelance industry analyst, with over 25 years experience in the IT industry. Prior to joining CRMHelpDeskSoftware, he spent 4 years as a Senior Consultant at Sierra Systems Group, part of Golden Gate Capital, a leading private equity firm with $9 billion in capital under management. Jimson currently resides in Rome, Italy.