Credit unions face weird and wonderful attacks 09 February 2010 5:34PM Jason Bryce Medium sized financial institutions are increasingly being targeted by online criminal fraudsters. "From time to time our defences get tested, as they have been in the last week or so," says Chris Whitehead, chief executive of Credit Union Australia. "Criminals are targeting medium sized organisations. "I think they think it is a good strategy to test us because maybe they think we don't have the defences of a major bank, but we still have a good sized customer base. "We have had all sorts of weird and wonderful attacks and sometimes in quite large quantities. "As the largest of the credit unions we get a lot of phishing-related stuff." Credit Union Australia is currently dealing with a sophisticated spam email attack that attempts to convince customers that CUA's legitimate website - www.cua.com.au - is in fact a hoax site. The spam then redirects the user to a very believable fake site that features a fake log-in portal to CUA's 'web banker' interface. The credit union is believed to have received many enquiries from confused members. "Things have slowed in the last few days," says Whitehead. "But it really picked up for a few days last week. "I think the problems are being effectively managed by us."