A lot of web sites these days use “turin tests” to keep from having automated bots sign up for mail or other services. (Or post entries to a forum or something.) For those that don’t know, a turin test is a test designed to filter machines from people. I doubt I’m the only one that has occasionaly found one of those squiggly letter/number images to be so distorted that I’ve failed the test… Anyway, it seems that there is a new trend in phishing/spamming emails. From incidents.org they’re seeing some mass mailing attempts that seem to be aimed at getting people to identify “Captcha” graphics for them. (A captcha is basically the random number image used in many online turin tests.)
Tag: URL
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Beware web links from untrusted sources
There are flaws in Opera and Internet Explorer which could allow URL’s in the address bar to be obfuscated. One of the safest approaches is to be wary of web links from unknown or untrusted sources. To quote….
Claudio “Sverx” has discovered a weakness in Opera and Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to trick users into visiting a malicious website by obfuscating URLs displayed in the status bar. The problem is that the browser fails to show the correct URL in the status bar if an image control with a “title” attribute has been enclosed in a hyperlink and uses a form to specify the destination URL. This may cause a user to follow a link to a seemingly trusted website when in fact the browser opens a malicious website.
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The junk that you will find in web access logs
If you have a website, you likely will look at your logs from time to time to see just who or how many people are visiting your site. I’ve certainly looked at a lot of logfiles both for my site and for others and thought I’d pass along some things you will likely see. For starters you are likely to see requests for pages that don’t exist. Even if you’ve never made changes to your site, you may see requests for files like (more…)
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Database for malware URL’s
Incidents.org is soliciting people to submitting URL’s of malware, those addresses we get in mail that are a link to something, bad.
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Anti phishing information (phighting phishing ?)
Well, after the early week experience with getting a Bank of the West site taken down, I’ve taken on two more which have come in today. One of these was an ebay spoof, the other paypal. In both cases I’ve emailed the appropriate abuse address on the owners network (this time one is in China, I think the second was as well.) I did find out something neat about paypal and ebays ways of reporting. (more…)
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Phishing – Bank of the West Notice part three… (deeper sigh)
You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the URL of the phishing site thus far. That is, in part, because I feel as though it would be irresponsible. That someone might come across this and take advantage of the fact that the site is still up and running to harvest account information. I would like to think that wouldn’t happen, but hey, that’s why the site is there to begin with. Well, 72 hours and still no action. (more…)
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Creating a redirect page
This is one that comes in handy a lot. Like many things in computing there are a number of ways to accomplish this. My favorite though is one fo the simplest. (more…)