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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week
Thursday November 18, 2004 |
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The protection you need on the
internet today - Part 7 – or Don’t surf in shark
infested waters ... You get
an email from your bank or some company you do business with asking you to
verify your billing information on line – this is the typical phishing or spoofing email that hackers send out by the hundreds
of thousands to try to steal your credit card information, and supposedly 5%
of all people fall for these emails. Last week
I mentioned receiving an email from Citibank asking me to verify my billing
information online – even though I am not even a Citibank customer. It
looked very official and supposedly if I clicked on the link in the email it
was going to take me to a secure website – as in the email the website
was displayed as https: But when
I placed my mouse pointer over the website in the email it displayed a
completely different website address – a numeric ip
address. If you see a website address that is a number, there are many places
on the internet you can go to do what is known as an ip
address lookup. I always go to http://www.samspade.org
- a site named after the detective in the movie classic”the
Maltese Falcon”, and the author
- Dashiel Hammet -
once lived in the Davenport hotel here in Spokane. At Sam
Spade I did an
IP whois search of this numeric
website and found it to be registered to a Korean company. If this website
was truly legitimate it would have been registered to Citibank, so it was
obviously a fraud: whois
Whois: Server
Used: [ whois.krnic.net ] 210.115.192.14 = [ ] (www.nic.or.kr) Whois query: 210.115.192.14 ENGLISH KRNIC is not a ISP but a National Internet Registry similar to APNIC. The followings are information of the organization that is using the IPv4 address. IPv4 Address : 210.115.192.0-210.115.223.255 Network Name : KBSTRINET Connect ISP Name : ISP-1 Connect Date : 20010101 Registration Date : 20010101 [ Organization Information ] Organization ID : ORG35293 Org Name : KBS State : SEOUL Address : 18 Youi-do Young-Dung-Po-Gu Zip Code : 150-010 [ Admin Contact Information] Name : DoMyeong Choi Org Name : Korean Boradcasting System (KBS) State : SEOUL Address : 18. Youi-do Young-Dung-Po-Gu Zip Code : 100-791 Phone : 82-2-781-2753 Fax : 02-392-8773 E-Mail : dmchoi@kbs.co.kr
Phishing sites are usually operative less than
a day. A hacker will register a website online – probably using a
stolen credit card number and using an internet registrar that doesn’t
check the registration information. Then they can get a free email account
virtually anywhere and list of email addresses from any number of spam
companies. Then the hacker will go to the website of a legitimate company and
easily download parts of their website; their logos and main screens. Then
the hacker can modify this code and put it on their phishing
website. They send out a spam email of
maybe 100,000 and can expect to get 5,000 responses of honest people. In just
a few hours the crooks get up to 5,000 credit card numbers, pins, and
passwords. Usually within hours of a phishing email going out, people start reporting it to
the companies who are being spoofed, and then those companies get their
security people trying to close down the spoofing website. They can trace the site to the
internet registrar who sold the name, but usually they find the legitimate owner
of the site is registered as Mickey Mouse who Lives in Cheeseville,
Wisconsin. All the registration information is bogus – the only reality
is that 5000 people have had their credit card information stolen. Phishing is such a threat to Ecommerce that
most banks and retailers have informed their customers that they will never
be asked online to verify their billing information. So you should never
respond either to an email from anybody asking you to verify this
information. The program most people use to
connect to the internet is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which has
been plagued with security holes which have led to many of the internet
problems I have talked about in this series. Next week I’ll talk about
a new browser which by design eliminates many of these problems,
and best of all – it’s free. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2004 MTA Micro Technology
Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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