I have a really old three character aol screen name. For some reason, three character screen names are desirable to teenage kids that sit at their computers all day and want to be “hackers.” They try to find different ways to steal screen names that they want using “spoof” pages, or phishing attacks. Why do they want them? Because they are mentally incapable of rational thought, but that is for a different blog post entirely.
Because I have this screen name I get these phishing attacks pretty often and I get to see a lot of the new phishing schemes that scam artists use. Recently my inbox at this email address has been filling up with lots of what appears to be spam. Lots of spam at the same time and from different “companies.” Most email services have a button or text to click when you want to report an email as spam but these messages had that in the body of the email. When I clicked the link to report as spam, I was taken to a page asking me for my login info. I checked out the url and sure enough, it was a spoof page.
This is a fairly new tactic for acquiring my personal information that I have not seen or heard of before. Basically, “Phishers” are disguising phishing attempts with spam mail, which is annoying enough. So when someone tries to take steps to keep from recieving messages from that sender, they are instead giving their login information to scam artists.
The lesson is to always check a URL before typing in your personal information into a a web page! Hackers are always looking for new ways to get us to give up our personal information.
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