01.12.2004 09:11 - J.R. Hartley Strikes Again!
Oliver has been caught out by a very PAYPAL phishing mail. I got this a day or two ago, and it is very convincing. However, being of a suspicious nature, I didn\'t touch any of the links in the email. Instead I went and logged into my paypal account to see if anything came up there. Surprise surprise, I got in with no problems and no warnings came up.
So, if you recieve any emails purporting to be from Paypal or Amazon or Ebay, do what I did. Shut the email, go to your browser, and check your login. Then forward the message to the relevant abuse address.
I can actually remember one of the first ever Phishing attempts, waaaay back in 1998, when I worked for Gamesdomain. Someone was emailing people, claiming to be from Gamesdomain, and saying they\'d won something or other. Contained in the message was a small windows program which displayed a form which asked for credit card info. This was then mailed to an address. The amazing thing was that the extortionist had used his own email address, which we pulled out of the program by using a port monitor which listened to the IP traffic. It was quickly shut down by a quiet word to his ISP.
A couple of weeks later he was pulling the same stunt again, this time using a disposable drop-box from hotmail, which we also quickly shut down.
I reckon this is probably one of the first, if not THE first, attempt at Phishing.
