Recently we brought you stories about phishing scams claiming to be from the IRS or the Better Business Bureau.

With the phony IRS email, recipients were warned that they were under investigation for a false tax return sent to the California Franchise Tax Board.

The Better Business Bureau scam claimed that victims were on the receiving end of a complaint about their business services.

These emails are examples of spear phishing – a technique of putting off mass-spamming phishing emails in favor of targeting small groups of people with the scam messages, in this case corporate execs.

What the scammers are after is obvious. Want corporate data? Who better to target than the execs using it every day?

Joe Stewart of SecureWorks has found a Chinese connection to the two scams. The attacker behind the BBB and IRS operations has set up a new domain and server to host his or her latest scam in the People’s Republic.

Here’s Stewart’s take:
“Typically when we see malware from China, it has one of two purposes – to either steam documents related to trade secrets of companies and military/government institutions, or to steal accounts from online role-playing games. This new scam doesn’t seem to fit into either category, so it may represent the emergence of a new kind of Chinese-based cybercrime. The question is then, just what do Chinese malware authors intend to do with the vast amount of data they’ve stolen from over a thousand U.S. corporate executives?”