Beware the E-mail Scammers!!

Hi guys and gals,

I have been lurking on i-tube for quite a while now so thought it would be only fair that I create at least some content for the site. 

I am a freelance web designer/video editor but I am also a pc security professional. This means that most of my blogs are going to be of a technical nature but hopefully ones that will help people. This particular blog deals with the E-mail scammers.

What is E-mail Scamming?

E-mail scammers send you a fake e-mail asking you to click on a link embedded in the e-mail. When you click on this link it asks you for a password and username to a particular site or attempts to launch malicious software on your PC.

Example of a Fake E-mail

Below is a screenshot of a fake e-mail I received that appeared to be from Facebook. It told me that I had a message waiting for me and to click on a link to retrieve it.

You can see here that the url in the green box appears to be legitimate. However if you hover your cursor over it in the status bar the ACTUAL malicious url is displayed.

How is this possible?

It's actually very easy and requires only basic HTML knowledge. Let's take a look at the basic anatomy of how a link is created using HTML:

In this case the bad site is highlighted in red, but the user will see a legitimate site highlighted in blue. What the user see's highlighted in blue is simply plain text, and can be anything, but when they click on it it will take you to the badhackersite.com website.

To test this click on this link, you expect it take you to facebook when in-fact it will take you to google:  http://www.facebook.com

What can I do to protect myself?

Quite simple really, don't click on any e-mail you suspect to be suspicious or you don't know where it has come from. Don't open it, delete it straight away. If you do open one up hover your cursor over the link, the link should match exactly what is displayed in the status bar of either your web-browser or e-mail program. Services like Hotmail, Google and Yahoo! mail all offer filtering services which can help.

I hope this has helped someone.

-Track.