Re: Pishing mails on the increase? [OT]

From: Moe Trin (ibuprofin_at_painkiller.example.tld)
Date: 11/13/05 

Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 14:36:46 -0600

In the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.misc, in article
<4ofj43-tb7.ln1@news.heiming.de>, Michael Heiming wrote:

>Wasn't aware getting one at all, so checked my spam filer which
>is cleared nightly from cron. And really a bunch of those
>pretending to come from one or another bank have been received,
>but luckily automatically sorted out from SA. (Bayes catches the
>crap reliable)

One of the ISPs I use allows me to have multiple mail accounts. I mainly
use it for mail - and all of the accounts have nonsensical usernames
generated by piping /dev/random through uuencode and taking the last
15 characters of the first line of output. This makes 'dictionary' or
'phonebook' name harvesting a thing of the past. These accounts are
only used for contact with financial institutions, and I don't use
other accounts for that purpose. Thus, any mail from a plisher sticks
out like a mountain and is auto-deleted at the POP server. At most, I
see the headers, and that only when I enable logging.

>Taking a closer look, at least they are written in my native
>language. But and this is the miracle, wording/etc is so poor how
>on earth can people come a mucker on those?

They may be written in your (or my) native language, but it's quite
obvious that it's not the plisher's language - native, primary, or
even secondary. Still, you must never underestimate the stupidity of
their targets. As there is virtually no costs (well, minimal costs)
in producing and distributing the plish to ten or twenty million
addresses (my spam filter is working to well - what is the current
cost and size of a "Millions" CD?), even if fools are down at the
"one in a million" rate, that's ten or twenty hits per run, and if
they can average ten bucks a hit, they may be making a profit.

>Without looking at the header it's more then obvious after
>reading the first sentence that those aren't genuine.

It doesn't even get that far here - typically, if it's not rejected
by the SMTP server using basic blocklists, it's rejected based on
the From: or Subject: headers. Despite what the plishers may think,
not all of us have CitiBank or PayPal accounts in the mail names that
they found on those Millions CDs.

>What are your experience about the matter?

The single bank that I do use for Internet transactions and mail has sent
out snail-mail on average quarterly, reminding me that any mail from them
will include certain keys - one of which is personalized - to identify
it as being from them. They also don't ask to "verify" any account
details over the Internet, _AND_ state that if they do send an email
indicating a problem with an account, it will have me contact them in
return using their published toll free telephone number. That is why
I chose that bank.

        Old guy

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