Have you ever been phished?
I have! In part, this is an e-mail I received.
”Emergency please i need your help
How did this happen? A quick phone call told me the resident was right here enjoying life at Shell Point. So how was the e-mail account high jacked and used to send out this phish? That is one of the reasons for this speciale-Notes. When the resident wanted to send an e-mail, the Yahoo account was opened, the e-mail typed and sent. In retrospect, the page didn’t look quite right, but when you are in a hurry…. Obviously all the addresses in the account were utilized to send out the phish above. (This just happened to be Yahoo, it could happen with any e-mail account or page.)
What can we learn from this? If you open a web page or you e-mail account and it doesn’t look quite right, DON’T USE IT!! The experience here was not good but fortunately the bad guys didn’t (or couldn’t) infect the recipient computers so it seems to be limited to just that one time.
Now what? The recommendation was to not use that account again since you don’t know the extent of the penetration. Could they still harvest information if you sent or received from that account? A new account was opened and the names imported. Only time will tell if any use will be made of the old account.
What can you do? It would be a good idea to personalize your e-mail page so it would be obvious if the page were counterfeit. For example, with Gmail (my favorite), you can select many different themes. Just go to settings and click on themes. If you have a beach scene on your account and a page comes up in the “generic” Gmail page, you would know there is something wrong. This is a strong case for the ABCs, always be careful.
Hope this e-Notes is helpful. e-Notes Published by the Computer College Steering Committee (CCSC) Russ Kraay, Editor | ||||||||
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