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Thursday, March 10, 2005
Ng: Phishing and online criminals
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
VIRUS. This morning, I got another email, supposedly from our IT administrator. It said: “We have found that your email account was used to send a huge amount of spam messages during the last week. Probably, your computer was infected by a recent virus and now runs a trojaned proxy server. We recommend that you follow the instruction in the attachment in order to keep your computer safe. Best regards, The ngkhai.com support team.”
I had already received this note many times over the last few months. And I was not clicking on the attachment.
Although the email came from admin@ngkhai.com, it really was not. It came from somebody outside the company, who was trying to trick me into clicking on a link so that I would log on to his mock sites and infect me with a virus, or steal my passwords or information.
The industry calls this phishing, which rhymes with fishing. This is essentially what online criminals are trying to do—fish for information from you.
I think many of you will receive this—not only from your administrators, but also purportedly from Citibank, Bank of America, Pay Pal, Ebay and other reputable companies. The sender email will look quite respectable, and even the link will look okay. It may look something like this: www.citibank.com/cgi-bin/login.asp.
But the reality is that it is possible for HTML messages to point to one site, while appearing to point to another. If you can look at the source of the message, it will purportedly point to Citibank but it might actually point to a website like http://124.35.26.234/index.htm or something similar.
Sometimes it is very difficult to know whether the message is real or not, so never click on a link in an email message. If you get a message from Ebay or Citibank, go to your Web browser and type in the address of the company website. Log in normally and see if there is any problem.
The other thing you should do is keep your computers free of spyware. Sometimes, the spyware will infect your computers without your knowing it, and there are annoying ones that keep popping out online ads. But what you should be careful about are the silent ones that can record where you go and also send out information about your login names and passwords.
Two weeks ago, we signed up for a DSL at the house. My children were happily surfing already, but within one afternoon, they were able to gather about 25 spyware. The spyware just keep saying click OK, and the irony was that they clicked on many that said they would help install software that prevents spyware. But in reality, they were the spyware.
You should install Microsoft AntiSpyware, which is available for free at www.microsoft.com/spyware. But if you are running Windows XP, install Service Pack 2, which will enable security settings that should prevent you from being infected by spyware.
According to estimates, as many as 80 precent of all computers are infected with spyware.
(www.bizdrivenlife.net)
(March 10, 2005 issue)
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