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Phish Scams Fooling 28% of Users
Etaipo writes "Anti-spam firm MailFrontier Inc has done some testing with consumers to see if they could differentiate between legitimate e-mails and phish scams. The results, to me, were pretty shocking.
The company also has provided a similar test on its web site. Get an answer wrong, and we revoke your geek license on the spot."
Personally I never cared for Phish. They attracted a lot of the same fanbase as the Dead but I just couldn't bring myself to like them. I tried, I really, really did. It's sorta sad that now that they are breaking up for good that they are scamming 28% of the population. I would have never guessed that a cool jam-band would have to resort to this sort of scheming in order to get money!
I guess after all those tours and all those basically unsuccessful albums they are in need of people's credit cards in order to support their own solo touring and promotion.
All kidding aside, I am genuinely disgusting that the authors of these articles did not call this sort of scam by a legitimate title such as "fishing" or "credit card scamming" or "you are a fucking moron for falling for the give me your Credit Card Number in an email" like it has been in the past. I wasn't aware that "scr1p+ K1dd13 sp34k" had crossed into "real journalism". I can see it now... Parents banning their children from listening to Phish because FoxNews told them that they could have their credit cards stolen.
-1 Troll for the authors of these articles.
Why did I have to provide a credit card number before the test showed me my score?
Some of these fraud mails looked really legit and were mainly given away by the fact that their URLs went to something like fraudprevent-visa.com instead of fraudprevent.visa.com. fraudprevent-visa.com is a domain name that may or may not be affiliated with Visa, while fraudprevent.visa.com is a subdomain of Visa.com, meaning it's not 100% safe, but much more likely to be legit.
But asking people to know this difference is asking a bit much of them. What might be interesting would be a "Phisher Identifier" built into mail clients that could identify bogus or unauthorized URLs based on a very carefully maintained database of legitimate URLs.
Seems that a plug-in could be written for Outlook, Eudora, etc.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Pictures at eleven.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
But haven't fallen.
My parents got an e-mail stating that we were charged $3000 for a new Dell laptop. Nevermind that we all use Macs.
So I check out the site... Looks professional, seems legit, but it asks for a bank account and social number on a non-secure connection... Phishy?
I checked out the root domain of the given address and ran a search to see to whom the site was registered. Definitely not a real company, an individual, and the root domain didn't exist as an accessible webpage. Not the kind of thing that is very professional. I bounced the e-mail back and dismissed it. Our credit bill the next month didn't have a Dell laptop on it. What do you know?
All it takes is some common sense to get out of these things, but perhaps real companies should start adopting S/MIME or PGP to ensure their identities to make it more apparent to a layperson.
Of course, a false company could just as easily hide behind these "foolproof" authentication mechanisms.
Help a college student
any "nerd" would run his own DNS server and wouldn't need web-based turd like. Poser.
Honestly, I got through 3 examples before giving up. The real test for me is, "Is the link back to the official site? Or does it look like a link and take you to some mysterious 3rd party server?"
In this test *ALL* links pop up to a "for the purposes of this test, this link has been suspended" This makes the whole thing useless.
Anybody can copy a legit paypal or eBay email and change a few words and make it "look" real. The key is in the links and the data mining.
I got Verizon DSL service back in February. A month later, I got an e-mail that basically stated there was a problem applying the DSL charges to my phone bill. In the e-mail, which was sent to "Verizon Customer", they suggested I reply to the e-mail with my account name and credit card information.
I thought it was a scam, but left it in my inbox. Two weeks later my service was shutoff. Apparently the message was legit.
After I got the problem straightened out, I sent them a very nasty, yet informative, e-mail and they agreed that they will review their e-mail policies and apologized for sending such a message to begin with.
The problem with the test is that they obscure the links. To me, the big test of a scam v. a real email is where the links point to rather than the content and the test uses javascript to obscure where they're going.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
...I won't use an email client that renders HTML. Or at least, won't let me turn that off.
When I get these mails, 95% of the time I delete them unread; no legitimate business should ever need me to "confirm my information". Every so often I look at one, and since I only see the raw HTML, it's easy to see that the images and whatnot are all being pulled from the real company site, except for the "login" link which goes to some mysterious dotted quad address.
(Side note to companies: stop letting outsiders pull images off your server; only let your own pages refer to them. It's an Apache FAQ, fer cryin' out loud.)
Every so often a friend will send me HTML mail, but I can cope. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I answered one incorrectly as fraud (the MSN one), and the rest perfect. But I was surprised I actually scored so highly as the test removed all the methods I use to spot fakes:
1) I couldn't see where the links were pointing as they had been removed.
2) I couldn't see the email headers.
3) I had no idea if any personal information (at the most basic level, name) was correct or not. Though I would err slightly on the side of counting any email that has personal details in it as legit, it is obviously fraud if it carries somebody else's name.
4) Am I supposed to be actually subsribed to any of these services or not? If I get something from citibank like that in my inbox, I'm going to mark it as fraud as I have absolutely nothing to do with them. (This is my excuse for the hotmail/MSN one!)
It's very possible most people don't check the first two at all, in which case I have slightly more sympathy with them seeing how confusing it can be now.
Maybe an added layer of security could be to go to the site in question and log in from there manually to check everything?
You know you've been IMing too long when you almost say 'lol' out loud to a non-geeky friend...
They didn't show up in Mozilla. Switched to IE and they worked. They were using IE-specific javascript to put the link text in the status bar.
Do you have Mozilla set up to forbid javascript from modifying the status bar (as you should)? If you do , then whether or not the javascript is IE specific, it still wouldn't show the bogus link. I had to view source to see what they wanted to appear down there (mainly because I forgot about that setting until most of the way through the quiz).
"From my cold, dead hands you damn, dirty apes!" - CH