I'd rather be phishing?

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to phish and you feed him for a lifetime."
- paraphrasing a Chinese Proverb

Phishing is the act of catching unwary users of email and tricking them into giving personal information or clicking on a link for the purpose of installing malware or other nefarious actions. Phisherman are never so crude as to say, hey look, you don't know me but click here please. Instead they pretend to be someone you know having already stolen your friends email address book, or pretend to be a legitmate business that you deal with, or provide some incredible other that is too good to pass up.

• Never open or reply to any e-mail when you are unsure of the sender.
• If it is too good to be true - it is.
• E-mails that appear to come from a known entity (like your bank, the government, someone from your old high school, etc), often are spoofed e-mails and do not come from them at all.  
• If you see an e-mail from your bank - sign into your account directly from the official website - NEVER follow the helpful link they send you. That helpful link will take you to a fake website that will save your account # and password for later theft.
• If you get an e-mail notice from the government about your tax info, think about it. How did they get your e-mail address? And the IRS does not use email; they send you a nicely registered letter requesting your presence at an audit.

The internet is seeing a continuing dramatic rise of e-mails designed to fool you into action; and it does work or they would not be doing it.  Some of the most recent tricks are:

• Notices of copyright/trademark infringement
• Notices from the BBB about a complaint
• Notices from banks requesting an update of some kind or another
• Notices about problems with an electronic check/deposit (ACH)
• Notices from the Government looking for you to update your tax data
• Notices about problems with your tax return 
• E-Mails from old friends (they get that data from Facebook, Linkedin, etc, etc...)
• E-Mails asking you to help a friendly prince get his inheritance out of a country controlled by an unfriendly tyrannical government
• etc, etc, etc...

Bottom Line

This is nothing new - just a reminder to practice safe computing. Below is a screenshot of e-mail quarantined by one person in one morning; you can clearly see  examples of phishing.

It's a Twister!

“Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.”
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

On Instapundit.com I read about a weather warning system that sounds promising (but I have not tried so I can not vouch for it.) WeatherCall.net, http://www.weathercall.net/wc_whatisit.html, will register one location for $10/year and send you email, text message, phone call, etc if there is a severe weather warning issued by NOAA.

Subscribers may register one location, 3 telephone numbers and 3 email addresses for a nominal fee of $9.95 dollars per year. When severe weather is approaching the registered location, the system will call all the telephone numbers simultaneously, delivering your meteorologist's warning message, and send a message to all registered email addresses with a graphical depiction of the warning on a localized, interactive Google map.

Not interested? How about a weather radio that turns on for alerts?

Bottom Line

I admire entrepreneurs that start companies like this. (Why didn't I think of it? I can envision writing the code to make a system like this.) NOAA provides tons of information for events all across the nation. So the trick is filtering it to only a region of interest and then creating the phone calls and emails.

I found a list of other companies with similar services at Yahoo. I also found some sites, supposedly free, that I'll try out. You may want to opt out of ads from their sponsors to avoid spam.

http://www.emergencyemail.org/
https://registration.weather.com/ursa/alerts/step1
http://www.weatherusa.net/members/login.php?mode=new

Email Etiquette

"Diamonds are forever. E-mail comes close." - June Kronholz

Website TheOatmeal.com takes a humorous look at email etiquette.  My only fear is that the message is too subtle - some people may have no clue what is wrong with each example.

The title is "If you do this in email, I hate you." Here's a summary of the errors displayed.

1. Clinging to old technology and not using the power of the Internet. Why fax anything anymore? At my company we each sign (and fax to HR) a one page document agreeing that our email signature will be legally binding. Now no more faxes, our email response is sufficient.

2. Asking for a resend of information instead of searching your own email archives.

3. Chain letters to dozens of friends. Personally I find it very sad when persons forward a chain mail and don't clean it up - instead leaving the history of every previous person it was ever sent to.

4. Super long automatic email signatures or using graphics in your signature. This make the email unnecessary large and takes up space.

5. Besides a fax response (see cartoon #1) the 5th cartoon seems to be more a dig at non-disclosure agreements in general.

6. Email != FTP (File Transfer Protocol) - don't send giant files by email. They are slow to download and fill up the mail box space.

7. Email != Collaborative Editing Software. Note all the Re: Re: ... in the title showing how many times this email has been bounced back and forth. I would be guilty of using email this way since I've never worked with collaborative editing software. The closest I suppose is using source control software and Change Tracking to see who edited what. Source control are programs that let you "check out" a file, modify it, then check it back in. A checked-out file is locked and no one else can change it while you own it.

8. Unsubscribe - just like the cartoonist, I hate it when I have to sign in to unsubscribe because I may have no clue what my account ID and password are. A good unsubscribe knows who you are.

9. Don't overly decorate your email with background wall paper, and added art elements, etc. Again this added to the size of the email file.

Bottom Line

Email etiquette is interesting. Should it be as formal as snail mail or as informal as twitter? Should you use abbreviations like LOL, FYI, etc? Is it OK to spam your friends? What do you think?