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San Jose, CA, United States, 04/16/2008 – What: US Federal Court Subpoena Phish: cacd-uscourts.com
On April 14, 2008, Steve Kirsch, founder and chairman of the board of Abaca Technology Corporation received an official looking subpoena via email requesting him to appear in San Diego in front of a grand jury. It had his name, phone number, company, and correct email address on it and it looked pretty legitimate. Even the URL to find out more information looked legitimate at first glance.
A very sophisticated US Federal Court Subpoena phishing attack appearing to be sent from the United States District Court [subpoena[.]uscourts.com] was launched over this past weekend. Sent to CEOs only via very targeted and personalized emails.
Abaca investigated the situation and in most cases these emails were quarantined by the Abaca Email Protection Gateway (EPG) service.
The email is an official looking subpoena via email requesting the recipient to appear in front of a grand jury. It had may have the recipient’s name, phone number, company, and correct email address included in the message. Even the URL looks legitimate at first glance. This is not a legitimate message and should not be released from your user’s quarantine.
Please advise your readers to not open this message or release it from their quarantine.
Its purpose is to download malware onto their computer. If the email was released for their quarantine, please have them delete it. Warn your users to not click the link.
More info about this scam:
• Castle Cops U.S. Courts[.] cacd-uscourts.com E-mail scam alerts posted to the home page of both central and southern district courts:
• United States District Court - CASD - Welcome to CASD
• Welcome to the United States District Court Central District of California Protecting yourself from phish attacks
So how do you protect yourself?
1. Find out whether your current spam filter has a way to detect phish like these and how it works. If you are not satisfied with what you learn, check out the spam filter from Abaca which operates using recipient reputation and can instantly and reliably detect phish such as these as soon as they are launched without any human input.
2. Never download any software from a source you do not know.
3. Look for typos and other mistakes in the email.
4. If the email asks you to go to a web site, treat it suspiciously. Check out other pages at that website.
See if the images on the site belong to the site. You can also use “who is” to determine how long ago the site was created and who controls it.
5. Never trust anything in an unsolicited email from someone you do not know, no matter how legitimate it looks.
About Abaca Technology Corporation
Abaca Technology Corporation is an innovator in email protection and messaging security. Abaca’s patent-pending technology, ReceiverNet™, offers an advanced approach in the fight against spam—providing unprecedented levels of accuracy and guaranteeing 99 percent spam filtration. Abaca has created a portfolio of innovative products and services based upon this core technology, thereby assuring users unparalleled messaging protection from spam, as well as viruses and phishing attacks. Abaca is a privately held company headquartered in San Jose, California.
Media Contact:
Donna Candelori
Candelori Communications Inc.
P: 408-774-3414
E: dcandelori[.]candelori.com
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info[.]abaca.com 
