Phishing: The sending of official looking fake emails combined with official looking fake web sites with the intent of stealing your personal data identity, your bank account credentials, and more. They can use that data to rob you blind and cause you years and years of grief…

CAUTION:

DO NOT click on any link in ANY email, no matter how official it app rears, that seeks to INDUCE you to provide any personal information or credit card numbers. Please think about this, and remember it, so that several months from now when you receive one of these fake emails, alarm bells will go off in your head, and you will recognize it as fake.

IF you are concerned about your account: .

Either: 1) Manually enter the web address in you browser address bar for the account in question. Go there and log in. Check your account. You will probably find there is no problem. Find out how to submit a security report and tell them about the email you received.

2) Remember the telephone: Use it to call the account holder in question, and ask them about the email you received. Then ask them how to report it to their security department.

3) Otherwise, just ignore the email and delete it.

An excellent resource of information on this subject is the Anti-Physhing Working Group, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing educating and resources on this subject.

These phishing emails can look perfectly authentic. Even if you think you would never fall for such a thing, please check out this one that purports to be from AOL. And another one that purports to be from EBAY. And I’ve added another one tha looks like it is from Comcast.

And even if you wouldn’t fall for it, think about your less savvy computer using friends and relatives. Please alert them to this peril. Please go to these sites and scroll down the pages for the following samples and check out the information that they want from you. These are real copies of fake emails.

Fake AOL email example

Fake eBay email example

Fake Comcast email example

And these are a relatively unsophisticated phishes. Help stop these criminals by informing and educating everyone you know that gets email. Show them the examples.

We wish to applaud the recent legal action by Microsoft to initiate lawsuits against these scam artists. In this action, Microsoft has initialed 117 lawsuits against sites that faked Microsoft sites and emails. These included MSN and Hotmail.

But that doesn’t help those who fall for these fake emails.

Practice safe surfing.

Posted on Saturday, April 2nd, 2005 at 11:44 AM and filed under All Posts, Email Security. You can follow any responses to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or you may trackback from your own site.