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Sunday, October 17, 2010

New phishing scheme

I just received an email that appears innocent, but is actually a tricky phishing scheme. "Phishing is a form of fraud in which a message sender attempts to trick the recipient into divulging important personal information like a password or bank account number, transferring money, or installing malicious software. Usually the sender pretends to be a representative of a legitimate organization." (Gmail's definition). The email that I received (which was able to pass through the Gmail spam filters) looks like this:

The scammers here are posing as Adobe, a credible company, well known for their Acrobat Reader software. This email is tricky for two reasons:
  • It doesn't directly ask for your password or other personal information. (That will happen only after you click on the link to their website) 
  • The URL mentioned in the email actually links to that exact URL (In some schemes, the URL written in the email is linked to a different URL -- placing your cursor on the link will reveal the destination URL). In other words, these scammers purchased the domain "adobe-software-2010.com". If you examine the actual sender's address, you'll see that it is "newsletter@adobe-software-2010.com". 
If you receive such an email, protect yourself by not responding or clicking on any links within it. If you are using Gmail, you can help others by reporting the email as Phishing (as shown in the picture above). I reported this one, so hopefully you will not receive it!



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