| |
| |
|
Spam Blocker Information |
|
|
|
Phishing for an Identity
Phishing is rapidly becoming on the largest threats to your personal, financial, and emotional wellbeing. No I am not talking about Saturday afternoons out on the boat with your grandfather, listening to stories that being with "When I was your age?"-now while these probably conjure up horrific childhood memories of such stores, they in no way come close to the horror felt by victims of Phishing. Phishing (fish'ing - to trick people into providing their personal and financial information by pretending to be from a legitimate company, agency or organization) is a fairly new scam propagating itself on the internet in many different forms. Each has the same sole purpose of convincing you to volunteer your personal and financial information and hand if over to these crooks. One such attack was targeting PayPal (www.PayPal.com) customers, by sending out mass email (spam) stating that there had been a security breach and the account has been suspended until you verify some information. Well this may sound reasonable, but the truth behind this was it was not from PayPal; rather a carefully orchestrated scam to capture your PayPal username and password, credit card information, debt card pin number, mailing address, and social security number among others. What made these even scarier was the fact that the message was designed so well-using PayPal's logo and website layout perfectly-that even I had to take a second look. This convinced people of the legitimacy of the message and prompted individuals-estimated in the thousands-to happily provide their information over to the scammer. There were a few items that made this email message stand out as a fraudulent spam message rather than legit communication: ? Greeting: The greeting at the top of the message was "Dear PayPal Member". This should alert you as PayPal, along with most major companies will address you by name or company associated with the account. EX: Dear Steven ? Website address: The website address that was being linked to from within the message was not www.PayPal.com, but rather a very clever hoax. When you look at the link in the message it appears to go to PayPal's website, but when you click on it a different address (one of the scammer's website) loads. Now that I have scared you enough for one article, which this is not my intention to do so, but you must also realize the severity of this issue; there are a few simple things to keep in mind. Do not trust email messages. Let me say that one more time DO NOT TRUST EMAIL MESSAGES. If something seems fishy (no pun intended), do not trust it. If it tells you to update your information, call the company up that it mentions or login to your account as you normally would. In this example, you could call PayPal's customer service number or login at PayPal's website (visit it by opening your web browser and manually entering http://www.PayPal.com--not through the link provided in the email). Doing so will verify that you are not falling victim to Phishing. Steven Carlson is an expert in identity theft and issues relating to credit restructuring solutions. He is serves as the President and CEO of Digital Intelligence Group, Inc. (www.DigitalIG.com) a company that provides identity theft and credit restructuring services through its brand eCreditRx (www.eCreditRx.com).
MORE RESOURCES:
WatchGuard Breaks Quarterly Billings, Profit and Units Shipped Records - MarketWatch (press release)
Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
How to Write a Privacy Policy A Privacy Policy can be defined as the policy under which a company or organization operating a web site handles the personal information collected about visitors to the site. For most of us consumers, privacy involves protecting our integrity and our right to disclose or not our personal information to third parties, without letting anybody bother us with unsolicited communications if we do not want to be contacted. Im Guilty Until Proven Innocent No doubt about it."Spam" (unsolicited commercial email) threatens toparalyze and ultimately destroy the email system as itcurrently exists on the Internet. How To Identify Spam Most of us have opened our email program and found, alongside correspondence from people that we know, offers for products from commercial web sites. Some of these emails we expect. CAN-SPAM Basics I. BACKGROUNDThe CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them. Dealing With SPAM - An E-mail Address Strategy With SPAM being such a problem it might seem the right thing to do is never give anyone your email address. As a strategy that's not bad but it misses one rather important point; the purpose of having an email address is to be able to exchange emails, both with friends and also as a means to receive eZines from online forums and information sites. Which Spam Filter Is Best For You? With the number of spam filtering solutions increasing each week it's getting tougher for consumers to make informed choices in their purchases.There are 3 basic types of spam filters:IntegratedStandaloneOnlineWe'll look at each type of spam filter and at the end you should be able to decide what spam filter is right for you. Spam with Typos: Why Do They All Have Spelling Errors? A friend asked me: I don't get it. Why do spammers have such a hard time spelling things properly? I get mail trying to sell me "viagggra", increase my "brest" size, or save me money accessing "pr0n" sites or buying "seks toys". Stop Spam: How To Escape The Spam Hell-Hole If you're anything like me, you're pretty sick of it, and just want it to stop. What? Spam, of course. Fight Spam and Fortify Your Web Site with RSS RSS is the answer to the Spam epidemic of the past. Spam, any mass distribution of material across the Internet, can cause systems to back up and crash with unwanted and unsolicited material. Winning the War On Spam For years I didn't worry much about spam.But lately it's got out of control. What Exactly is Spam? Spam, as defined in the context of computers, the Internet and electronic messaging, is a term used to designate unsolicited bulk electronic messaging and communication. In particular, spam is unsolicited bulk mailings that are commercially oriented. Stuffing the Spammers! I'm really, truly fed up with spam. Every day when the spam arrives and Norton Security moves it into the Norton Anti-spam folder of my Outlook email client, I wonder how anyone can be so incredibly stupid as to waste their time sending me such garbage. Getting Back To Basics. While we all agree that there`s way too much spamming/junk-mailing going on in our email boxes, there are a couple of things we can do to reduce the amount of mails we actually have to sift through, without having to resort to paying for expensive software that can be a real pain to set up properly. Firstly, and this is a great, little known tip. How to Fight Back BEFORE Youre Falsely Accused of Spam A friend of mine received a chilling email message from his ISP the other day. Someone had reported him as sending SPAM and the ISP warned that an additional SPAM complaint would result in losing his hosting service - period. Spammer in the Slammer: Jeremy Jaynes Sentenced to Nine Years Will other spammers take heed? Don't count on it.Jeremy Jaynes was on top of the world. What SPAM Means: Stupid People Annoying Me English, German, Italian - It's All SPAM To MeHas anyone else noticed the sudden blast of unsolicited e-mail (spam) loaded with url's for the unsuspecting and curious Internet surfer to click on?What's even better, the bulk of this SPAM is in a foreign language. I was at a neighborhood party this weekend and you can't imagine the number of people who asked me for assistance with this. Stop Spam! New Spam Blockers News last week that Internet service provider Verizon settled its lawsuit against Detroit-based spam king Al Ralsky was of little comfort. Ralsky agreed to pay a fine and stop spamming Verizon customers, but he still has plenty of other targets. Three Faces of SPAM Like everybody who will ever read this, I get spam in my e-mail. Mine seems to fall into one of three categories. Junk Mail Works! Junk mail works.Why does it work?How does it work?These are very important questions. How Spammers Fool Whitelists - And How to Stop Them Effectively stopping spam over the long-term requires much more than blocking individual IP addresses and creating rules based on keywords that spammers typically use. The increasing sophistication of spam tools coupled with the increasing number of spammers in the wild has created a hyper-evolution in the variety and volume of spam.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2006 |
