Salesforce.com is warning customers that they may be the targets of malicious
software or phishing scams, after one of its employees was tricked into divulging
a corporate password.

In a note to customers, Salesforce said that online criminals have been sending
customers fake invoices and, starting just a few days ago, viruses and key logging
software. The e-mails were sent using information that was illegally obtained
from Salesforce.com.

Salesforce.com bills its Web-based CRM (customer relationship management) products
as easier to use and maintain than traditional CRM software, but this latest
development underlines the security risks that come with this more open model.

The problems began a few months ago, when a Salesforce.com employee fell for
a phishing scam and divulged a company password that gave attackers access to
a customer contact list. With this password, the criminals were able to obtain
first and last names, company names, e-mail addresses and telephone numbers
of Salesforce.com customers.

"As a result of this, a small number of our customers began receiving
bogus
e-mails that looked like Salesforce.com invoices," Salesforce.com said.

Some of those customers then fell victim to the scam and gave up their passwords
to the criminals, too. When Salesforce.com started seeing malicious software
being attached to these e-mails, the company decided to issue a general alert
to its nearly 1 million subscribers.

According to the Washington
Post, Suntrust Banks was one of the customers victimized by this scam.

Jan Sabelstrom noticed that something was amiss when an e-mail
purporting to be from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission landed in his inbox.
This phishing attempt contained information about one of his company's customers
that would have been available to Salesforce.com, but not the public at large,
he said.

Sabelstrom, managing director of CaSa Customer Solutions, a Chicago-based CRM
consultancy, said he emailed Salesforce employees, including CEO Marc Benioff,
about the message on Oct. 30 -- the same day that Salesforce.com notified its
customers of the problem.

"I basically shot them an e-mail saying... I would like to understand
how this came to be," he said. "It seems a little bit dubious to me
that there's this connection between me and my customers."

Salesforce.com's response showed him that the company was taking the issue
seriously, Sabelstrom said. Within two hours he heard back from Benioff, and
soon the company's security team was walking him through what had happened,
and assuring him that his customer's data had not been breached. "I was
impressed," he said. "You can call it damage control but it was attentiveness."

Salesforce.com is working with law enforcement to resolve the problem, but
in the meantime it is recommending that customers implement a number of security
measures in order to cut down on the phisher's chance of succeeding.

Suggested actions include restricting Salesforce.com account access to users
who are within the corporate network, phishing education or the use of stronger
authentication techniques to log on to the Salesforce.com servers.

On Tuesday, Salesforce.com declined to comment further on the matter. "Everything
that they have to say about it is in this note," a spokesman with the company's
public-relations agency said.

IDG News Service

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