Avoid getting hooked by Phishing
Wikipedia defines Phishing as “the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.” Definitely a mouthful. Let me explain using a real-life example.
I recently received an email seemingly from Google AdWords. I advertise the services of Dogpaw Studio on Google’s ad network to increase our bottom line. The “From” address was reactivation@google.com, so it seemed real at first glance. Then I read the email’s content.
It basically told me that their attempt to charge our company credit card for our monthly balance failed and that our advertising campaign had been suspended. Obviously, I checked online and found that our campaign was still active. Getting me to click on a link in the malicious email to update our primary payment information was a criminal attempt to obtain our credit card and billing information.
Just for fun, I clicked on the link in the email and my ever-vigilant Firefox 3.0 browser confirmed it was fake with this nice message:
Reported Web Forgery!
This web site at www.adwords.google.com.sessicv.cn has been reported as a web forgery and has been blocked based on your security preferences.
Web forgeries are designed to trick you into revealing personal or financial information by imitating sources you may trust.
Entering any information on this web page may result in identity theft or other fraud.
On this screen, I could also conveniently click on a button to find out more about why the site was blocked. To learn more about Phishing, visit this page on the Mozilla Firefox website.
Here are a few ways to avoid getting caught:
- Instead of using the URL contained within the email, call your actual company to ask them if the email is real or fake. At the very least, visit the correct URL, log in as usual, and check for any notices resembling the email’s content.
- Look carefully at the URL in the email. This was the one in mine: http://adwords.google.com/select. Notice that it begins with “http://”. This shows me that it’s not even a secure URL. Responsible organizations will use URLs starting with “https://”. Notice the “s” for “secure,” signifying that all information will be encrypted in transit to this website. You can also compare the URL in the email to the one in your bookmark.
- Download and use internet web browsers that protect you from entering suspicious sites. I primarily use Firefox 3.0, which helps protect me from suspicious websites by displaying messages like the example above. Read more about how Mozilla Firefox web browser handles Phishing here.
Don’t get caught. Be smart!
The other side of the coin…
I have been victimized by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, Google and Tucows.
Until December 1, 2008, I had an online educational magazine for those in the screenprinting industry, which was located at http://universaldomainexchange.com/xsjmonline/. It has been around since 1983 and has subscribers from around the world. It is highly respected as it contains no advertising what so ever - only relevant educational content.
Recently, while moving the site to another server, I had to rebuild my databases, as the magazine is ran on a Joomla database. While the magazine was down and completely out of service, a block was placed on the site. This should have been impossible, since there is nothing on the site that could possibly be considered malware, phishing or anything else. There was nothing there as the database ceased working when we switched servers.
There is a serious flaw in allowing anyone, including discontent competitors, to report a site as a phishing site and cause an interruption of a perfectly legal business entity. I contacted my web hosting company, IX Web Hosting, which explained that they could do nothing as they are a reseller through Tucows. I contacted Tucows and they stated that it was Google who does the actual blocking. I tried contacting Google and in fact filled out the online form to have the block removed, but nothing has happened.
I have been in touch with the Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section, Criminal Division U.S. Department of Justice who stated that they are taking a very serious look at this as they have had a great number of complaints by other legally operated sites that have suffered from the blocks. I have also contacted the Federal Trade Commission who is taking an interest, also from a large number of complaints. Additionally, I have contacted the Internet Crime Center of the Federal Bureau of Investigation concerning this matter.
This is a form of business interruption, which is illegal in the United States. There are case laws that address the situation and I suppose it will take a block on a site owned by Dell, IBM, or other large companies with the money and the lawyers to bring the case to court. I would imagine that who ever is behind the blocking will no doubt be slapped with some pretty hefty fines from the government and will likely be sued in a civil court for considerable sums of money for shutting down just one business of the likes of Dell for even one day.
Bill Hood
Solutions Journal Magazine
I know that Google is the entity that provides the phising list of sites to Firefox. Firefox is actually removing it from version 2 when they release the final update soon.
But it will continue to be used in Firefox 3.
Curious… why not just publish your Joomla site on your own domain?