Email hoaxes are a very serious problem on campus. They can be anything from bank spoof sites to lies about your account being deactivated.
Know that your bank/PayPal/Ebay/Case would never send you an email telling you that your account is about to expire, and to log in to verify status.
If you are ever in doubt as to whether or not something is a hoax, ask the Help Desk before you do anything.
How to identify email hoaxes
• |
You may search Symantec for the hoax. |
• |
You can try to Google a line from the email, which will reveal sites to tell if it is a hoax. |
• |
ALL CAPS. If the majority of the email is in caps, it is almost certainly a hoax. |
• |
Urging recipients to forward the email to everyone in their address book. |
• |
Describing a virus or warning as "the worst ever" or the "worst thing on the internet." |
• |
Misspellings. |
• |
Redirectors in the URL. If a web link is given, hold your mouse over it without clicking. You will notice that the site is not the same as the site it states in the email. |
Phishing
Phishing is a scam. It will be an email that directs a user to log into a fake site, claiming to be legit.
Taken from http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/p/phishing.html:
The act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. The e-mail directs the user to visit a Web site where they are asked to update personal information, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers, that the legitimate organization already has. The Web site, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the user’s information. For example, 2003 saw the proliferation of a phishing scam in which users received e-mails supposedly from eBay claiming that the user’s account was about to be suspended unless he clicked on the provided link and updated the credit card information that the genuine eBay already had. Because it is relatively simple to make a Web site look like a legitimate organizations site by mimicking the HTML code, the scam counted on people being tricked into thinking they were actually being contacted by eBay and were subsequently going to eBay’s site to update their account information. By spamming large groups of people, the “phisher” counted on the e-mail being read by a percentage of people who actually had listed credit card numbers with eBay legitimately.
A great site to demonstrate what phishing is and how to spot a phishing scam is:
http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2005/phishing.asp
(includes a demo)
|
