News:

June 20, 2009
China and Internet Crime

Gary Warner's blog has an excellent exposition of the role being played by Chinese registrar, hosts, and law enforcement in the proliferation of internet crime. While most of these agencies may not be intentionally supporting criminals, their lack of action in the face of mountains of evidence -- while making profits from spammers and their stolen credit card and Paypal accounts -- amounts to the same thing.

With the Chinese censors devoting a massive number of man-hours combing the internet for material they find inappropriate, it seems odd they don't have any concerns about the fact that thousands of domains are being registered with fake identities and hosted on computers that are being controlled by criminals who have infected them with malware.

June 3, 2009
Phishing question

A visitor submitted this question:

This is called "phishing." It's pronounced the same as "fishing." The spammer is trying to catch people instead of fish. A phishing website tries to get people to reveal secret information by pretending to be another website that they know and trust.

This spammer sent out millions of emails like this. Most got blocked by spam filters. Some were sent to people like you who don't have PayPal. Others went to people who know that PayPal doesn't send out emails like this. Those emails won't catch anyone. Not every baited hook catches a fish.

But if even a few people read this email and are fooled, the spammer can make money. Most phish try to get people's passwords. If the spammer gets a PayPal password, he can steal money from the account. Or he may ask for enough identification to take out a new credit card in someone else's name.

This phish is interesting because it tells you to use Internet Explorer to visit the site. You don't want to do that! Internet Explorer is more vulnerable than other browsers. It will download malware (bad software) without you even knowing it. It looks like this phish is trying to put malware on your computer. Once it's there, it will allow the spammer to look at the information on your computer and even to see everything you type. He can rent your computer out to people who want to mail spam or who want to commit crimes.

You did not include the link to the phish website in your email to me, so I can't say more about the site. You should not go to this site. To find out what the URL is, you need to look at the html code for the email. Information on how to do that is on the spamcop.net website.
If you report the phish website, you can help other people avoid being victims.

You can go to the InboxRevenge forums to learn more. There are phishing experts there who are happy to teach people how to help fight these criminals.