Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Phish

I fell for a new-to-me and I thought rather elegant phish yesterday, in the form of a Facebook message saying"

Heyy Jack, what are you doing in this video?? LOL!


--with a link, and sent from (seemingly) an honest-to-God Facebook friend with whom I sometimes communicate. And not only the email; the message popped up on my FB message page, with the picture of the (supposed) sender.

I'm ashamed to say I actually punched in on this one--and got a blank page. Oddly, I don't seem to have compromised anything. I sent the "sender" an email and only then learned that it was a fake.

So, stung. Actually, what should have tipped me is that this person is just about the last among my acquaintances who would say "LOL;" also most unlikely to add an extra "y" to "Hey." The price of spam freedom is eternal vigilance.

Update:  Wups, maybe not benign--read the comment infra, and if you dare, follow the link (seems safe to me).    The link offers help for Macs, but anybody got any advice on how to scrub my PC?  I've got good basic security, but who knows...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/10/new-java-trojan-attacks-mac-os-x-via-social-networking-sites.ars

maybe not benign

Anonymous said...

DEFINITELY NOT BENIGN - and "cross platform" - removes password protection of your machine thru Java - at least later Macs are offered "do not run" by OS X, not sure WinTel does same - link to Mac story, but links beyond that to others

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/27/security-alert-new-trojan-horse-apps-attacking-the-mac/

Buce said...

Ah. Ooh. This is one time where perhaps I'm lucky to have a PC. My anti-virus updated with a protection against this one a couple of hours ago; I've updated and a scan comes up clean. But good advice from both previous commentators, for which much thanks.

Anonymous said...

Been getting email from friends with (No Subject) as title. This means their email has been highjacked and they have to cancel their accounts and set up new. A pain in the ass.