E-Musings Mon Immorata

When Phishing For Compliments? Spoofed Web addresses ensure you surrender more than you should It's official. Data scamming is now termed as Phishing. And even has its own working group too! For everyone who came in late, phishing uses spoofed e-mails and web site URLs to fool users into divulging personal data including credit card and ATM numbers, user names, passwords, social security numbers and any other financial data. The Anti-Phishing Working Group publishes a complete list of attacks. Phished targets include Citibank, MSN Hotmail, PayPal, eBay and several US and European banks. As well as one of my mail IDs which received a message purportedly from the US Department of Homeland Security claiming they needed Social Security information to authenticate that the anonymous recipient wasn't a terrorist! Evidently the phisher phishing phor data didn't realize that not all mail IDs are operated by people possessing US Social Security numbers! Long live Anonymous Email! However all email-based phishes are linked to a web URL since there's no other way to let a phished recipient exchange information with a phisher. The typical giveaway in a mail message that can alert you include machinelike language constructs including grammatically incorrect sentences as well as repetitive phrasing and inconsistent use of capitals. Of course, most business mail today is often an equally terrible read. But phishing is evidently quite lucrative with up to 5% of recipients responding to these online scams!!! If you don't want to maintain such a high degree of alertness. Or also subscribe to the "Safer Than Sorrier" school of thought try Corestreet's SpoofStick browser extension. Available for Internet Explorer and FireFox browsers, this detects if a web address visited matches its listed IP address (You're On) or is an attempted phish and displays the IP address details regardless of the text URL in the address bar. Unfortunately, the IE version works only with IE and not with MyIE2: my favored weapon of choice for web surfing. The customization available is minimal. You can change the warning font size and color, but nothing more. But with an extremely fine line between phishing and genuine service announcements, "Perfect Paranoia Becomes Perfect Awareness" quite easily. I now regard just about any seemingly official mail with grave misgivings. So besides verifying visible mail headers. I also use the free Sam Spade for Windows tool kit for a full mail header analysis and also back trace the SMTP address! The Sam Spade suite combines multiple network-related utilities into a single interface. It includes nslookup, whois, IP block whois, finger, SMTP VRFY, DNS zone transfer, SMTP relay check, email header analysis and more. Several features included in this suite are also available in Windows 2000/XP but run as command-line programs making it difficult to save results. I ran three separate mail headers from a colleague, a possible customer and a spammer through the Email Header Analyzer. The first two messages checked out fine. But the third (spam) failed the test as the sending SMTP server given in the mail headers didn't match the real sender's address! I then decided to put my ISP (tataindicom.com) to the test if they had abuse posting IDs (typically postmaster@, webmaster@); which they did. Interestingly the abuse ID scan also turned up a hughestele.com domain! I then checked if the two domains were included in the RBL (Real time Black hole Lists) that contains IP addresses for known spammers. Both domains green-lighted. Then following a Langa List thread, I revisited Karen Kenworthy's fantastic collection of free system utilities. Karen's site is also a treasure trove for VB6 developers. As for me I'm more interested in the tools than just building them. And the LAN Monitor displays my active network adapter's speed, IP address and DHCP data. As well connections to and from the computer including name (where available) and IP address of remote clients along with connection type. You can also view network traffic stats in real time. Most neat. But now with a crick in my neck and a growling stomach, I leave you for another week. Stay Safe! Click Here to Email Me