Have you been phished lately?
April 29th, 2008 by Randy DavidsonYou are a hip 21st century kind of person right? You conduct a lot of business online: check your bank account, monitor your credit cards, and browse eBay every chance you get. These days in order to do any of the above you must have an e-mail address. I am a firm believer that e-mail is a good thing, seriously in need of a makeover but still a useful concept. One thing is certain; if you have an e-mail address you will get spam. Loosely defined spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail or junk e-mail. Some of these messages will undoubtedly request that you take some action to confirm your identity. With that e-mail you have been introduced to the world of “phishing” (pronounced fishing).
information. In this respect e-mail is much like traditional, or snail, mail through the US Postal Service. I can postmark a letter to your home address and put false information in the return address section. The post office would never know it did not originate from who I said it did. Once the letter is received and marked “return to sender” it would not come back to me, it would instead be returned to the incorrect address written on the envelope. Fooling an e-mail system is just about that easy. Essentially, you can be whoever you want to be when you send an e-mail message (if you know what you are doing) by changing the return address. This is called e-mail spoofing.