Today for the first time I fell for a phishing attack. I now realize how vulnerable everybody actually is to phishing. I always considered that only suckers and very naive people fall for these things, I mean they are pretty obvious, aren’t they?
Yes and no. Although I’m semi-paranoid about my personal details and the security of my information, I managed to fall for one of these things. And it wasn’t even that amazingly done. So what happened? I’ve had a very stressful few days. Between work, getting ready for FUDCon on friday, an exam, and an assignment for the course I’m taking I haven’t gotten that much sleep. I’m pretty much going on automatic for a day or two. Something needs to be done, I do it. Things get thrown on the stack and I take them one by one and try to do them as quickly as possible. Great. How is this related?
This evening I got home from work and was planning on working on my presentation for FUDCon. I’ve already got some preliminary templates and some stuff planned out. I’ve also been planning to buy a computer-USB-cellphone cable to synch my phone contacts with my computer/email contacts. I’ve been looking on ebay and sending a whole bunch of messages to seller asking for answers. This evening I decided to look in my Junk folder to see if any of the replies went there because I didn’t get any. To my surprise some did. Great I read them and moved on. Then I briefly flipped through my other junk mail. I saw another email from an ebay member. Huh? The email was claiming that the member sent me the product and was waiting for my money.
Full stop.
What?
Since the past few days were really hectic I thought to myself did I accidentaly click Buy It Now somewhere? Quickly I clicked on the ebay link and typed in my password. Weird, why didn’t camino remember my password today? Bang, error page. Weird. Why didn’t ebay accept my password? I open up another browser window and go to www.ebay.com, type in the password. Smooth sailing.
Suddenly reality sets in. Crap. I went back to the first window and saw that they didn’t even mask the address bar with some JavaScript trick. That’s right. The address bar had a clearly non-ebay address. I’m glad that 2 or 3 weird events in a row made me realize my mistake and that I was able to login and change my password within 5 seconds of realizing it. Phew. Most people wont.
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