How to protect yourself. Don't give out your information via e-mail (phishing)

Hallo everyone! It is me, Manny-your friendly neighborhood consultant :-)…


As a veteran e-mail systems consultant, I’ve been on the front lines defending small to large institutions from e-mail attackers. In the course of my day to day operations, I’ve gained invaluable techniques for identifying spam/phishing/spoofing, and many other malicious forms of e-mail attacks. But nothing devised by antivirus/firewall manufacturers suffices. For the ingenuity of idle minds, or perhaps not so idle minds, no system provides a fire-proof system-which leads us to “Cautiousness” as a last resort. Thus, it is only obvious to me that I needed to share this information with my family and friends.

I put together this e-mail so you too can defend your information from unscrupulous people, who are bent on stealing your personal information. It is not easy, perhaps time efficient, and to always be alert and quickly decipher those e-mails. Therefore, I live by one simple rule I think we all should adapt with our e-mail usage: Only open e-mails from people you know. If the e-mail has no name, and instead displays something like a product or is not clearly identified in the FROM: field or in the e-mail’s body, delete it, period. Don’t waste your time reading through them. Also, if the e-mail is in the Junk E-mail/SPAM folders, 99% of the time it is junk/spam/phishing/spoof, etc…delete it, delete it, delete it.

But just deleting the e-mails is not enough. You can be pro-activated  by fighting them back. They already have your e-mail address, and who knows what else. You can fight them by closing them down. How? By contacting the merchant they were impersonating via their website or via e-mails. You can also report them to the government. Below are links and e-mail addresses of the two I contacted this morning, as examples. If you don’t know how to contact a merchant, a quick search in Google.com with a phrase like “report phishing JCPenny” can quickly produce good results.

Below is an example of how thieves get your information through e-mails. I receive the e-mail below this morning from aw-notice@amazon.com on the FROM: field, asking me to “Click here to verify your account

”. Notice the link has nothing to do with Amazon.com and they address me as Dear Amazon cutomer@comcast.net ? Well, these are all trippers of my security antennas as to its true intent.



Dear Amazon Customer@comcast.net ,

During our regularly scheduled account maintenance and verification procedures, we have detected a slight error in your account information.

In order to confirm your Amazon account records, we may require some specific information from you.

Click here to verify your account

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choice but to temporarily suspend your account.

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.
Sincerely,

Amazon Inc. Review Department.



Ok, here’s what I did.

I prepared an e-mail and sent it to Amazon and also to the government. They have a way to get these thieves out of business. It is not enough to just delete those e-mails. If you have a relationship with a vendor, go to the merchant’s website and search for their policy to report these scams to them. Here are the links to Amazon and the link to the government, in case you need to make a report.

Report PHISHING To Government

Website : http://www.us-cert.gov/nav/report_phishing.html
E-mail : phishing-report@us-cert.gov

Amazon.com's Efforts to Stop Spoofing

Website : http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=4060771

E-mail : stop-spoofing@amazon.com


Hope this helps prevent identity thefts and if at all, a better and well-informed e-mail user. Please excuse if it is wordy or a bit extensive, or if anyone feels more information is better, let me know. I will post this in a website/blog as well. And here’s my blog… http://neighborhoode-mailconsultant.blogspot.com/


Best regards,

Manny Artola