A new and very well crafted spoofed Bank of America Alert is making the rounds:
Subject: Bank of America Alert : Account Locked
From: Bank Of America <onlinebanking@ealerts.bankofamerica.com>
In reality, the email address is spoofed and could be coming from anywhere, but the ones we’ve reviewed so far came from hostgator.com accounts through their annonymous “WebsiteWelcome” domain:
gateway08.websitewelcome.com ([69.56.142.29])
Let’s see. Who has knee replacements? Grandparents? Great-grandparents? Great-great-grandparents? Let’s just say — people who are in the “kind of old” to “really old” population segment. A demographic that’s also likely to find using email a struggle.
In other words, a nice pool of victims for an advance-fee fraud campaign involving knee replacement surgery. more »
One of the online communities most frequently targeted for phishing is craigslist.org. This is primarily because, as their about > help > spam page puts it, email is “integral to the functioning of craigslist”. Because of this, craigslist account holders are used to seeing a lot of email from craigslist. Seeing a lot of email from the same source leads to complacence.
Spam and phishing emails count on you to automatically trust the purported source and click the links. Which is why you need to know how to spot them. more »
If you can’t sell your product, pretend to be something else.
Adobe’s PDF reader has been in the news frequently over the past year or so because of security issues. But this isn’t about that. This is about taking advantage of Acrobat Reader’s high visibility and accelerated update schedule to funnel traffic to a different PDF reader. more »
S-P-A-M? S-M-A-P? S-A-M-P? M-A-P-S??
Have you ever noticed that some spammers seem to be really bad at spelling? Given how often spam messages contain weird spellings, you might assume that spammers are poorly educated or just plain stupid.
Nope. more »
Spammers send a lot of email. Like millions of messages a day. You might be wondering how they manage to type and send a million messages without dying of carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s simple really, they use mail merge software that sends the same message to a lot of different addresses.
Occasionally the results can be entertaining. more »
Don’t get us wrong. We really like instructables.com. In fact, we’re thinking about making one of these for our next project. Yeah we know, we’re nerds. It’s not like we’re in the spam wars because we’re glamorous:)
Anyway, it looks like somebody found an “instructable” on how to hijack web forms and used it on the instructables site. more »
The idea of perpetual motion has fascinated both scientists and con artists for centuries. So far the scientific community hasn’t been able to invalidate the Law of Conservation of Energy but, since laws are merely a suggestion to the scammerific community, breaking a few laws of physics here and there is no problem.
Not being physicists, our objections to the validity of the email below are based more on our knowledge of scams. That, and the belief that if something like this was really invented it would be impossible to keep secret. more »
