Don't Get Hooked by Phishing

In the past couple of weeks, as I check the spam trap we've set up at Message Partners, which is a fake email address that only gets spam, which, because it only gets spam, we can take it, analyze it, and use it as a basis for content analysis to start rejecting other emails outright to legitimate email addresses (which, when used with Postfix, we can now do pre-queue, so the bad email is never even allowed onto the mail server).

So I was looking through our spam trap this morning, and I just could not believe the number of phishing emails. And their new, not so ingenious trick is to warn you that your account has been hijacked and you better respond QUICK.

That's like getting robbed, the cops come and take you away to safety, only to reveal that they also want to rob you (which actually happened to a friend of mine in Brazil). So they scare you, hoping you let your defenses down, click on their link, and they do exactly what they warned had already been done to you.

Let me repeat: never ever NEVER respond to an email requesting account information. If you believe you might be having some trouble with a bank or ecommerce sight, simply log directly onto those sites.

For me, phishing is just an annoyance, but for others, some have lost just about everything.