20th June 2006

Unpacking the truth in phishing schemes

posted in isafety |

Phishing schemes continue to abound. Thankfully my spam filters keep most of it out, but sometimes one gets through. Today it was an email ostensibly from Wells Fargo:

Phishing email

The inconsistent uses of capitalization at the bottom of the message caught my eye after I studied this a bit. What are we teaching in these schools today?! Aren’t we teaching young digital hackers (or old ones I suppose) how to properly capitalize titles?! ;-)
The real evidence of phishing, of course, is revealed when you view the source code HTML for this email message:

Phishing email source code

Are we teaching students in schools today how to test and unpack the truth, like we need to do for phishing schemes like this? Do our teachers know how to do this?

Interestingly, if you visit the root website domain for the link, you see the following:

The root domain of the link in the phishing email

It is not clear whether or not this site has been hijacked by Internet hackers or whether the actual owner is using it for illegal phishing activities– but it appears malicious links are contained on the site that people do NOT want to visit– and certainly don’t want to use to submit info about their bank accounts.

Unpacking the truth. It’s something we all need to know more about, and we need to practice together. I’d say it’s a fundamental skill of Internet safety and digital citizenship.

On this day..

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 6:06 pm and is filed under isafety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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