Phishing Spam (Bank Fraud etc)

German text in Brown is unchanged (except name) as it was received, aimed at a real German bank. English text in Green has been added.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Criminals copy a bank's web, modify it to steal & send on passwords, crack some internet server or private PC. (as a bank robber steals an innocent get away car), uploads the new fraudulent web pages, & spams you.

How to avoid it.

• Do not click on bank type mails.
• Type web addresses yourself, or mouse copy a known good address from your own local notes.
• Copy address of bank from your file to browser with mouse. (But consider before you copy across account passwords by bluetooth (radio) mouse ? Do you trust encryption if any ? A cable mouse is more secure).
• Enable the little window at top of browser to show you where you really are. Try under eg Edit -> Preferences -> URL display (URL = Uniform Resource Locator = posh name for web address).
• Look extremely carefully at URLs in phishing mails: They name your bank, but take you somewhere else, typically the source looks like this:

  <A href="http://www.your-bank.com.thieves.com/login"> http://your-bank.com/login</a>

  Always look to the first single slash, then read backward, to see where you are being taken, eg to a fake page of your-bank.com within thieves.com
• The difference in URL may be as little as one letter, & not as obvious as the thieves.com in the example above ),
• To examine a potential phishing email:
  • On Unix, any old programmers editor will do, eg ed or vi, etc.
  • On Microsoft DOS or CP/M: (Any ancient editor such as Edlin would have done,but as XP etc perhaps won't have equivalents , save suspect mail enclosure to disc, & view it with a web page editor that can show where clciks go to, ie target URLs. li>
  • Or View the suspect local file with a web browser. Type into browser URL window the local file address, eg: file:///home/my_user_name/mail/suspect.txt If browse is Firefox, Click: View -> Page Source.
• Suggestion: Practice analysing a sanitised one before you receive the next real one. To do that:
  • Save this page locally.
  • Remove top above first XXXX line,
  • Remove tail below second XXXX line.
  • Mail it to yourself as HTML
  • Note copying it from this web page with a mouse will Not work.