When Spammers Caught Me Off-Guard, Firefox Came To The Rescue …

I would surely consider myself to be an advanced user on the internet and a pretty ‘net-aware’ person, but I realised that even guys like me can be tricked by spammers or let’s be more specific, by phishers !!

I had a late start to the day today, and in the haste of catching up with things I was quickly going through my emails. While doing so, I happened to come across a mail from Paypal saying that they have recently seen forgery attempts on my account and there has been a lot of activity from foreign IP’s. The link they asked me to click was also nicely masked, and I din’t hover the mouse long enough to look at the actual web address. Normally, I know a ’spam’ mail from a ‘real’ mail as the spammers don’t really work hard enough to weave a good story to make an advanced user click through, and they rely mostly on the boomers who sometimes have limited knowledge on the internet. This time though, it was a different story, the ploy was quite well portrayed and I got tricked :redface_wp:

Having fallen for the email, especially when you have quite some money in your Paypal account, I just clicked through to know what was wrong. That’s when Firefox came to my rescue. I have been a fan of Firefox since ages now, but the faith just keeps growing with instances like these. I am sure this will make some of you IE7 fans a convert!

Here is what Firefox displayed when I clicked through …

Immediately it prompted me that the suspected attempt at web forgery and raised alarm bells. I also love the way they make it so obvious, so much so that you just can’t miss it!

For those of you wondering how IE7 would have behaved with that URL here is the screenshot of the same URL in IE7, and yes, my phishing filter for IE7 is on. Also, I tried to check the web url online and got a message saying that the service from Microsoft was temporarily unavailable. How lame!

I even went one step ahead and keyed in some dummy data, only to realise that the phisher had done an amazing job at replicating the exact process of a “Paypal Login” and after the 5 second processing screen I was routed to a page where they ask me about my personal details and credit card information. Jackpot !!

Anyways, I posted this so that those of you who read the post know when to save your back. Stay safe!

One comment so far

The Web Is A Chakravyu!

This isn’t the usual Microsoft bashing for the sake of it. My friend Saumil actually took screenshots of an identical situation in both Firefox and Internet Explorer to prove it!