Many of the websites, which are offline or have been redirected, were nearly identical copies of PayPal’s website, according to OpenDNS, a security company that in part monitors for suspicious domain name registrations.
PayPal has been a target for fraudsters who have registered domain names that try to mimic legitimate PayPal domains or services in order to compromise accounts. The more convincing phishing websites in this latest batch may have been created using a custom software kit rather than merely copying and pasting code from PayPal’s real website.
OpenDNS is still investigating and was not ready to attribute the spate of attacks to a specific group.
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