About a year and a half ago, Amnon Jackont, an Israeli mystery novelist and Tel Aviv University history professor, became ensnared in a mystery of his very own: friends and students were receiving e-mail messages from him that he had never written....


Jackont took his computer to the Israeli police last fall and was told to reformat it. But his problems persisted. So the police examined his computer more closely and discovered that a malicious program known as a Trojan horse lay hidden deep inside and had hijacked the machine from a remote location....

A new threat emerges
More recently, a hybrid form of phishing, dubbed "spear-phishing," has emerged and raised alarms among the digital world's watchdogs. Spear-phishing is a distilled and potentially more potent version of phishing. That's because those behind the schemes bait their hooks for specific victims instead of casting a broad, ill-defined net across cyberspace hoping to catch throngs of unknown victims.

Spear-phishing, say security specialists, is much harder to detect than phishing. Bogus e-mail messages and Web sites not only look like near perfect replicas of communiques from e-commerce companies like eBay or its PayPal service, banks or even a victim's employer, but are also targeted at people known to have an established relationship with the sender being mimicked....

By Timothy L. O'Brien
The New York Times
Published: December 4, 2005, 4:45 PM PST