Phishing

According to Wikipedia

Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money), often for malicious reasons, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. You can take a look here if you want to read more

http://bit.ly/1Wup8P9

Every day I am sent phishing e-mails, some of them look very convincing and some are so rediculous it is alomst comical.

There are usually tell tale signs that make them easy to spot.

I'll show you a message I was sent recently and how I spotted that it was a Phishing message




The first tell tale sign is I don't have a BT account so that gives the game away immediately - These people make up anything that looks plausable

The email is then set to make me think that I have to act immediately. or I will lose my mailbox.

This is when I recived the message

Wednesday 28th October  and I am told that I must act before the 31st because it says so!

So naturally I think I must get this done, I can't risk losing my information

But hang on something doesn't seem right.

If I look at the sender it patently isn't from BT, it says so if we look a bit closer and look at what I have been sent there are a few errors

The message says bt@comms which is ridiculous. it would be from a proper address, something like someone@somewhere.com or someone@somewhere.co.uk so this is blatently wrong

Then next to the "name" we see the actual link, Ecurlin@aol.com which is where a message would be sent if you replied to it. I can also check this by looking at the contact information in the message

If I click on the reply button the reply address looks decidedly dodgy

So alarm bells are really setting off now.

But there are other things I also am looking at that also show that this is a very dodgy message. Taking a closer look there are three links I am offered but I can check by hovering my mouse over any one of them and see where the link is looking to take me to, just like below

It is now possible to see where these links go. I wasn't stupid enough to click them and see what could happen.

So I a message sent to me that looks innocent is proven to be very dodgy and I have showm you the giveaways.

If a message comes through to you that looks wrong it is better to be safe than sorry. Be cautious especially if you are asked to type in any of your banking details.

Rick