Hi
Well, I have been busy lately but I can't refrain myself from posting this; recently I have got tons of phishing emails claiming they are from local banks. In most of those financial institutions I'm not even a customer! Anyway, it doesn't hurt to try :)
Bellow you can see the original message, but pay attention to the email sender (xxxhrs@webxc31s05 and goes on). They don't even bothered to use something more realistic. There is only a single link at the bottom of the page pointing basically to www.djentachi.kz which definitively does not sound as a valid web address for this bank :)
The bottom line: as always be careful with everything coming into your email box.
Adriano
At least this seems to be the main approach of hackers.
In the last couple weeks I received at least 7 messages from the same sender, with the exact same contents:
It's in portuguese (at least) and says something like: "Hey dude, here are the photos!".
What photos? I don't remember asking any friend called "gabriel" to send me any photo ;) even more with supposedly annexed photos linked to files like "fotos_237.com" on a very suspicious server (at least the guy wrote my name correctly)! No thanks !!!
In this same time range I got other "phishing" emails like:
Another email in Portuguese, pretending to be from hotmail trying to foolish me to get in panic and click on a link.
This one (also in portuguese) is supposedly a "Virtual Card" from a girl named "Carla". It even includes a "copyright" notice in the end of the email.
Well, maybe may mommy would be tempted to clink on these links but not me. Anyway, this kind of threat is getting more sophisticated as time passes so pay attention where you put your mouse :).
Best.
Adriano
Hi.
Today I reached this page (on cert.org) site talking about C++ secure standard practices. I haven't read it to the end yet but at a first glance it looks pretty interesting (and useful) to me.
Wait, don't call yet!! There's a page regarding safe practices for C also!
I'll be reading this as soon as I get some time to ;)
Adriano
Hi!
Am I in a bad mood today? Well, maybe, but I really feel upset when something supposed to help me to be safer on the net starts to get into my way or, even worse, pushes me in the other direction.
That is what happened today when I tried to use a well know credit card website (which I'll not name here :) to see my billing information. Of course, as I don't use this service very often, I didn't remember my user name / password!
Ok, (I thought) I just need to call their support service and ask them to reset my user name / password to one that I do know. So, I picked up the phone and called them.
My first issue was that they didn't allowed me to choose my user name! Ack! Ok, this is not a big issue anyway (I can always write it down somewhere). The real problem (in my opinion) is that they requires that you MUST set a password which is at least 6 but no more than 8 characters in lenght! And you MUST use numbers also!
Ok, I understand that mixing numbers, digits, punctuation, etc. in a password helps to make it stronger, but these rules forces me to give up on my "password schema" (I use different passwords for each site; each password is an encoding of a lengthy phrase).
The result? I'd never be able to remember the password I choose (no matter which one I pick); it's even worse as probably I'd choose a weaker one in a desperate (hopeless) try to not forget it again.
After this episode I decided to take the time (ok, I'm a little bit lazy) and give some password manager a try (at least they succeeded in the purpose of forcing users - at least me - to use a stronger password :). I'll be experimenting with a firefox plugin called iMacros.
Let's see how it works :)
See you.
Adriano.
