Clever new phishing scam targets unemployed New Yorkers

A new phishing scam is targeting unemployed New Yorkers, stealing their driver's licenses, Social Security numbers and other personal information in order to resell it on the "dark web."

Here's how it works: Victims are lured with authentic-looking text and email messages that link to a carbon copy of the New York State unemployment website. After a victim enters their username and password, the fake site asks for high-quality images of sensitive documents. That gives the cybercriminals access to the person's name, address, phone number, date of birth, driver's license number, Social Security number and email address. The phishing attack was active for several weeks, according to Steve Ragan, the security researcher at Akamai Technologies who discovered the scam. The scammers were able to remain anonymous by hiding the fake website behind a proxy server, an intermediary domain that cloaks the originating IP address.