The scourge of phishing

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 04/05/2012 - 07:02

A lot of new phishing schemes are popping up....a family member mentioned that she got an email "from US Airways" telling her to check in for a flight....I've gotten hundreds of those in the past week.

I've gotten very official-looking messages from the IRS, from the Better Business Bureau, from AT&T, from Verizon, and other well known companies....all sent by automated bot-nets...Russian, eastern European, and Chinese gangs are using these phishing schemes to try to trick you to log in to a bogus "official" site and capture your user id, validate your email address, get passwords, and to try to trick you into entering your credit card info.

You can check these easily by rolling the mouse pointer over the links in the email. If you wait a second, your computer will pop up a little box with the actual URL of the link. You can usually tell by inspection that it is not an official link. But they are very clever....for example:

I have received a bunch of phony LinkedIn messages.

The correct URL for LinkedIn is www.linkedin.com

the phony URLs have been things like

www.linked.in
www.linkedln.com (the second 'i' is an 'l')

you can also look at the FROM email address. I just got a US Airways spam sent from an IRS.GOV account. I'm pretty sure US Air does not use IRS computers to send out their email.

The lost productivity costs of phishing are enormous. Many of these messages are getting through two layers of spam filtering here, and that means sifting through your IN box, checking each one to make sure it is not legitimate, and then deleting it. It may only be a few extra minutes a day, but multiply that by the millions of people getting these, and it adds up.