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Gone Phishing
by Steve McCabe, Delphis.dm
Its the worse type of spam it purports to hint at problems you may have with your account at popular sites such as e-Bay.com, and asks you to click on a link to log-in and correct your account problems, often by re-entering your credit card details or such-like. If warning signals arent going off in your head by now, they ought to be!
This technique is called "phishing". The e-mail looks genuine, and often the site the link sends you to looks like the real thing, but its a clever means to get confidential & personal details from you. So how can you tell its is a scam? Of course, if you dont have an account with the company they claim to be, thats a good sign! But still, if the e-mail carries enough authority it can still fool you.
The best means of defence in a case like this is to examine the URL of the web site. You can easily do this without even visiting the site in question by moving your mouse over the URL in the e-mail. Your e-mail program should show you the actual URL youd be visiting if you clicked. So if for example the link says www.ebay.com but the actual link is different or even a raw IP address like 192.168.0.2& you know somethings wrong. With the Net, always err on the side of caution when it comes to giving out personal information.
For lots more information on this topic a great site is www.antiphishing.org. And for lots of info on other e-mail hoaxes, go to hoaxbusters.ciac.org.
Incidentally, if you want to know the meanings and origins of tech words such as phishing, theres no better site than www.wordspy.com!
Steve McCabe
Delphis.dm
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