http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5519990/

Some of you are familiar with this and many of you may not be. All I can say is that the Interent is not a secure place. I've been doing IT and to a lesser extent network security for 9 years now and the last 6 months are by far the worst I have ever seen.

This article is about "Phishing". Phishing is a form of "social engineering", which means that the bad guys try to get your personal data from you by tricking you into passing out the data and is in many cases easier to do than a brute force "hacking" of your systems. I encourage everyone to read this article and remember to NOT reply to any of your bank stuff, especially credit cards, over e-mail unless you are absolutely certain it is legit. You are better off calling their customer service anyway...

I spend too much of my office time fighting petty crap like this that could be better focused on better pursuits


:smash: :af: :smash: :af:

I get an average of 1 of these per day.
Can't belive that many people fall for it.

Stupid is as stupid does...... Forest Gump

I get 15 of these a day and about 200 hundred regular spam and viruses in my 300 e-mails per day. A lot of those have e-mail addy's from members here (hijacked outlook lists and some people's lack of computer security)... It happens...

I am Director of Sales for a Company that sells anti-phishing and Identity Theft protection to major corporations. If anyone wants info PM me.

Diligence, paying attention to what you click on, and some good antivirus/spyware removal software goes a LONG way.

I deal with hosed PC's all day long and its amazing how many people just click on whatever they get.

John any advice on antivirus or spyware software. I have Norton 2003 but I wonder what I am lacking....

Originally posted by likwid
Diligence, paying attention to what you click on, and some good antivirus/spyware removal software goes a LONG way.

I deal with hosed PC's all day long and its amazing how many people just click on whatever they get.

Cleaning an end-users PC as we speak.


And they all swear they didn't go anywhere on the internet

Originally posted by Surely Bassey
John any advice on antivirus or spyware software. I have Norton 2003 but I wonder what I am lacking....

Keep the Norton but set it to autoupdate daily. Also, don't turn your machine on and immediately start e-mail. Norton STUPIDLY turns off your AV as it checks and downloads updates so your system is extra vulnerable at that time.

Won't help with the fishing but download ADAWARE from Lavasoft.de. The freeware version will only help after the fact by cleaning out stuff (tracking stuff / malware / reg hacks) or pay for the proactive version...

I'm GUESSING Piemma has an intelligent filtering solution??

List of stuff thats WORKS

Norton AV 2004 + http://housecall.antivirus.com or panda activescan (www.pandasoftware.com)

Norton has really started to dissapoint me lately, it dosen't seem to catch as much stuff as say Housecall or Sophos (a corporate solution thats very expensive) do. But its still a nice resident AV program that does a good job protecting e-mail and general system viruses that most people will catch.

Ad-Aware + Spybot 1.3 (catches EVERYTHING... one will pick up stuff the other dosen't)

If you have super entrenched trojans and whatnot, TDS-3 does wonders, it can kill just about any running process and delete it before it can reactive itself.

The latest VX2/f's have been a total nightmare to remove from systems so TDS-3 has almost been a necessity for tearing crap out. It'll also find alot of inactive trojans that Ad-Aware and Spybot don't catch.

If you're not computer literate I'd avoid using TDS-3, you can really do some major damage to a system with it if you're not careful.

Hmmmm...where do I get this TDS-3? I have one PC here in the shipping department that needs to be nuked but I can't do it because they use this app by a company thats out of business and we can't get a copy of it anymore.

I had to shut its internet access off it was getting so bad




Never Mind I found it....thanx

Yikes, I just took the phishing IQ test and scored 100%!
Maybe I should work on being a criminal mastermind rather than an accountant.

I got a 90 and the one I missed I erred on side of caution calling it fraudulent. One of the big problems with that test is that you cannot view source and even verify the links as legitimate thru properties of the link and other give-aways...

I downloaded the TDS-3 App and combined w/ the adaware s/w I managed to clean up 2 real problem PC's. That TDS-3 s/w rocked. I had been using Adaware, Spybot, and Spysweeper for some time combined but it wasn't working on these PC's.

What other site can you talk Fishing AND repair PC's at the same time. :D

Thanx again