Devin Brown Computer Services

Phishing Attacks

These days there's a new kind of "Spam" hitting e-mail inboxes around the world. They're called Phishing Attacks. The purpose of these "Attacks" is to coax you into going to a website that looks like and official site, like Paypal or Visa or the like, and enter your login information. The site you're on, may look like the real thing, but it's not and the moment you enter your login info, the hackers at the other end have it and will use it to steal money from you or worse, steal your identity. There are some simple techniques you can use to avoid falling victim to this terrible crime. Below you will see a screenshot of a recent attack I recieved with a description of how I knew it wasn't the real thing. Click on the images to see a larger version.

In this first image, you can see that although the website looks impressively official, three things caught my eye. First, the URL does not contain paypal.com. Secondly, it's http and not https which means it's not encrypted. A real site, like Paypal, would always use secure, encrypted logins. And third, the widths of the username and password fields to not match. This may seem like a minor point, but a big, official, company like Paypal wouldn't make obvious coding errors like that. This is not Paypal!

For comparison purposes, here's the login screen from the real Paypal.com.

Hopefully, this information will stop you from becoming another statistic in the battle against internet crime.