The Minnesota Department of Health has received reports of callers posing as being from the department and asking for personal and business information, including credit card numbers.
The department said it appeared to have been subjected to this “spoofing” attack, a practice used to falsify the telephone number or name on caller IDs to disguise the identity of the real caller.
These calls have been designed to appear to come from MDH’s main phone number of 651-201-5700. These calls are not being made by MDH, and MDH urges recipients of suspicious calls to not give out any personal or financial information.
With the increased use of technology that allows people to make calls using the internet, spoofing has become more common.
“This is a type of attack, among many methods, that we are seeing with increasing frequency and sophistication in Minnesota, and we have been working to raise this issue at the Legislature this session,” said Aaron Call, the state’s chief information security officer. “This example is demonstrative of the tactics used every day by those intent on stealing our personal information or disrupting the important services on which so many Minnesotans rely.”
Persons shouldn’t give out personal information in response to an incoming call. Identity thieves will pose as representatives of banks, credit card companies or government organizations to get people to reveal their personal financial information.