banditws6
Shrinking Time and Distance
join:2001-08-18
Naples, FL
 ·Comcast
| What's with Microsoft? My parents nearly fell victim to one of these new phishing scams while I was sitting in the same room over the Christmas holidays. They had received some kind of email from Earthlink (their dialup ISP) claiming that their credit card did not go through on the last attempt to automatically bill, and that they needed to go to a web page and enter a new credit card. My dad was actually going to do it, but at the last minute he decided to get my mom and ask her to make sure the credit card he was entering was a good one to use.
Hearing that, I happened to take an interest in what he was doing and was immediately suspicious. But the "padlock" icon in the browser was on, and the URL bar showed an address at earthlink.net. Must be all right, I thought. But then I remembered the new phishing scams -- which I read about here on DSLR -- and so I went back to the email and checked the source code. Sure enough, it utilized this exploit to pass a false Earthlink URL to the browser. If I hadn't been a frequent visitor of this site, I might have allowed my dad to submit his credit card info to the scammers! Fortunately I caught it and was able to stop my parents from proceeding before they submitted the form.
That Microsoft blithely ignores this problem is sheer stupidity. On my home computer, I've switched to Mozilla Firebird full-time and I'm not missing IE in the slightest. In fact, using Firebird has allowed me to see just how poorly IE interprets a lot of CSS and other markup!
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"I'll follow the law until it's just stupid." -Ted Nugent |
