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A few folks have noted, privately or online, that it's best to simply
delete messages from banks, Paypal, and so on. This is generally sound
advice, but it's important to note that doing so runs the risk of
missing important information. For example, I've signed up to be
notified by e-mail of Paypal policy changes, and every so often, my
bank or credit card company does contact me by e-mail.
That's why my advice remains valid: "...go to that location yourself:
manually type the URL in your browser. Don't ever click on the link in
an e-mail, since (as this example shows), the phishers can be
exceptionally clever at tricking us." In many cases, as is true for my
bank, there's a special message area that I see as soon as I'm safely
logged in. Or I can call the local branch and ask what's up.
Janice Gelb noted: <<Actually, the safest thing to do is not to pay
attention at all, no matter how legitimate the mail looks, unless the
email has your specific customer name as the addressee (e.g., "Dear
Geoff Hart" or "Attention: Janice Gelb"). Online contacts that are
legitimate always put the customer name in the message; phishers
obviously can't.>>
Wish it were that simple, but it's not. I've received a goodly number
of phishing messages containing my full name and occasional ones
containing the names of colleagues. Names are easy to generate
automatically from name databases or to harvest by trolling newsgroups;
indeed, some of the spam I get makes it look like someone is feeding
Web site addresses into the "Whois" service to extract the names of Web
site owners.
I get many messages per week "misaddressed" to someone else, presumably
in the vain hope that I'll contact the sender and say "you sent this to
the wrong guy", thereby revealing myself as the kind of person who
responds to these messages. I don't. If I recognize the person's name,
I'll contact them myself. If not... trash the message and ignore it.
Janice concluded: <<If you're really concerned, log in to your account
normally from another window unrelated to the spam at all. Or, just
ignore it. If something's really wrong, they'll contact you again.>>
Agreed. Of course, if you're running Windows* and use online banking,
credit card management, Paypal, or the like, you should make regular
antispyware scans (and updates of your software) part of your regimen.
And you should probably replace Internet Explorer with Firefox for such
transactions. Typing your confidential information into a browser
window won't do you much good if your system is infected by a keystroke
logger or if (as is the case for IE) your browser is about as secure as
a paper bag filled with water.
* Not to start a Mac vs. Windows war. Thus far, there is no documented
Mac spyware and only a handful (literally... no more than 5 at last
count) of viruses for OS X. By way of comparison, the software on my PC
has a scan database rapidly approaching 50K entries. Macs will
eventually be hit too, but for now, it's Windows users who have to be
excruciatingly cautious.
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