Thursday, December 01, 2005

Phishing is Fishing for Information


No one will ever ask you for your password, social security number or credit card information in an email ;that is, a bank or anyone that you normally do business with.! It is not safe to send this kind of information in an email because it is not secure (secure means that it does not have a special web page that can only be seen by you). They would know that information anyway. If they are asking for this information you should be very leary. Never give out your personal information to a place the asks in an email and do not go to a link from an email and think that you are at the sign in page, they may just be trying to get your password! Always be careful when answering a email that asks for more information then you are willing to give out in public. Think of email as post card type mail not a sealed letter.
A bug in Internet Explorer brings more Phishing Scam woes...
iDefense.com publicly announced the bug yesterday, which will allow phishing scam artists to capture key strokes as users enter information into log in and form pages of genuine sites while using Internet Explorer browsers (v5.01, 5.5 and 6).
The bug allows this to happen by using javascript to display the genuine site page within another domain using a frameset. By framing the genuine page in one main window of another site's page, the visitor sees the genuine page.
Framesets are commonly used in the design of web pages, they allow you to have more than one page displayed as if they were one page, above each other or beside each other such as the top banner being one, the side bar being another and the page content being another. Learn more about what exactly a frameset is here.
Microsoft are so far placing emphasis on ensuring that internet users should verify the identity of the page they are visiting before interacting with it in any way. Normally, a visitor will see the true URL in the address bar. If you want to keep current on what hoaxes in emails here are some good links:

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