I have just received a Paypal Email

Please update your account details etc....

GREAT EXCEPT I DON'T HAVE ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PHISHING WARNING

I got one of those once. What gave it away for me was that I hovered over the hyperlinks in the email, and the URL it was linking to ended in ".ru", and it didn't have the word "paypal" in anywhere.

I'm always getting emails from the Halifax for similar - and I don't have a Halifax account. Tip - always check what address is hiding under the link before going anywhere from an email you get about stuff like that. I had a very clever one yesterday - apparently someone had sent me a greeting card from a popular website. Except the under the link was an IP address rather than a named address. I decided to investigate, and got a page telling me that the redirect was disabled, but if I downloaded a file I could view the card anyway. Said file was a .exe, so I downloaded it and ran it through the virus scanner. It didn't find anything, and running the file produced to obvious disaster (or hasn't yet), but I'll bet if it was run directly from the browser then all hell would have broken loose....!

The way URLs work, if I recall correctly, is that they break down the characters in the URL to their ASCII counterparts.

This causes a few problems, because different alphabets use the same letters as us, but are encoded differently. For instance the Russian alphabet uses the letter "p" for their letter "r". The two letter "p"s may look the same, but may be different, and clicking on a link with a false "p" would send you elsewhere.

I'm not too hot on the whole name to address translation thing, but somewhere along the line the entry gets turned into the IP address. I don't know if it's done in a single step, or if the address in the browser gets sent to the DNS server as something other than the type displayed on the screen which is then interpreted by the server and matched to the address of the intended destination. Guess that's why I play with workstationsm servers and printers rather than websites and data centres....!

Try this then:

http://the-pit-lane.co.uk/index.php

http://the-pit-lane.co.uk⁄index.php

I can see in the link bar at the bottom that the second one isn't what it says it is....

Precisely. But to the untrained eye...

OK, try this one:



http://the-pit-lane.co.uk

<think> Just had three this morning,from LloydsTSB,Halifax and Natwest about my on-line bank account trying to accessed
Must admit that's the first time that's happened to me,should I be chuffed ?<tumbleweed> :P
I don't bank on-line btw

i get these all the time, although never from HSBC who are the only bank i use.

Don't see any difference.

you need to look in your status bar at the bottom left of your screen stef.

The second one has additional characters in there that don't show up in the link so could redirect you to a phishing site (of course LT wouldn't dream of such a thing :P)

See how easy it is to fall for it.

(The second one doesn't actually lead to a phishing site, btw. It just simply won't work.....I think!)

I'm not convinced. Tau, I think you're the mastermind behind it all! :o





<roflmao>

I once got caught up in a phishing scam. I was stuck with 72lb of cod for weeks.
































<peek>

I see now, crikey it is quite simple......as am i .... <blush>

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