Spoofing and Phishing Alerts

[geekerati]

I received an email today from some spammer. When I clicked on the message I was greeted with a red banner at the top of the eMail from Google alerting me to be very careful.

How long has Google been testing out this service? This is the first time I've experienced it. I looked briefly to see if this had already been posted and I didn't find anything about it.

Spam comes in a variety of forms, including fraudulent messages. This mass-messaging is called 'spoofing' or 'password phishing.'

Such fraudulent practices involve messages that appear to be from a legitimate source, or the creation of an official-looking webpage that asks you to provide your username and password or other personal information. Such messages or pages could ask for your Social Security number, bank account number, PIN number, credit card number, mother's maiden name, or birthday.

Spammers often ask for this information in an attempt to steal your Gmail account, your money, your credit, or your identity.

Google is currently testing a service designed to alert Gmail users to messages that appear to be phishing attacks. When the Gmail Team becomes aware of such an attack, the details of these messages are used to automatically identify future suspected phishing attacks.

The result: when a Gmail user opens a suspected phishing message, Gmail displays a warning.

Gmail's phishing alerts operate automatically, much like spam filtering. Gmail's spam filters automatically divert messages that are suspected of being unwanted messages into 'Spam'. Similarly, Gmail's phishing alerts automatically display warnings with messages that are suspected of being phishing attacks so that users know to take care before providing any personal information.

You should always be wary of any message that asks for your personal information, or messages that refer you to a webpage asking for personal information. If you receive this type of message, especially from a source claiming to be Google or Gmail, please do not provide the information requested.

Source

[mondine]

This is the first I've heard of it. Good for them!

I wonder what this would look like, as I usually read mail from POP3 access, in plain-text only.

It may be a while before I find out, as I haven't yet exposed a gmail address to the usual sources of harvest.
(That's what Hotmail, and Yahoo mail are for. )

[IamTheKing9]

Yeah. It's a good thing that Google has added this feature to all the features that GMail has. The kind of an incident that happened to you, geekerati, has never happened to me, but I think this Anti-Spam feature is useful.

[geekerati]

I hear you Mondine! Lol!

I made the fatal mistake in asking for my credit history from the big three agencies that monitor us. Twenty four hours later, my spam folder is filled with all sorts of junk. It's not a matter of 'what was I thinking', cause clearly, I was not.

At least, it was not my primary Gmail account.

[IamTheKing9]

Not your primary GMail account, eh? How many do you have?

And let me tell you one more thing - I enter my Gmail ID whenever an e-mail ID is needed, as believe it or not - I haven't got even a single spam mail till now!

[geekerati]

Originally Posted by IamTheKing9

Not your primary GMail account, eh? How many do you have?

And let me tell you one more thing - I enter my Gmail ID whenever an e-mail ID is needed, as believe it or not - I haven't got even a single spam mail till now!

I have just two accounts for Gmail. One for the serious and one for the not so serious stuff. You only have the one? My 'catch all' is gm4ils@gmail.com, it gets slammed with Viagra, Propecia and Cialis adds, and even explicit content from time to time. Every flim flam man and schyster on the internet is trying to hustle that account it seems. That's what happens when you accumalte a million different cookies Opting you into every advertising agency on the internet. I'll take the time to go to all the proper sites and Opt-out, but I'll clean up my cookies and accidently get rid of the good ones at the same time, causing it all to happen again in time. It's entertaining at times to just sit back and watch all the rubbish that passes through it though. My HoTMaiL address was my spam account for the longest time. It reached a point when it was almost unbearable to use, that is, until they added the advanced features for filtering. I set my account for exclusive knowadays. If you aren't in my address book, you don't exist. I use Yahoo, too, when I'm dealing with their huge portal. It's controlled madness, I tell you. For the most part it's still fun to me. I enjoy coming home to eMail, even if it's mostly spam. You only have one Gmail account?

[IamTheKing9]

Yeah, I've got only one, because of the fact that it's all that I need. And, for your information, I got my GMail account from GMail 4 Free. But the problem is, it's closed now.

[davekeogh]

Just check the headers. They tell you everything about an email. Where's its been when, and where it has come from. It can tell you what ip address it came from too. This is always helpful, say you got a phishing email from Google. you could check the headers and if they ip address pointed to some Dial up user in country Tipperary, Ireland i don't think you should trust it. IF anyone wanted you to reconfirm your details they'd ring you, or mail you (as in snail mail). Just be careful, just as when you are crossing a road, look and listen!

[IamTheKing9]

Yeah, the headers are pretty useful. You just have to click on "More Options", and you can see the e-mail address of the sender of the e-mail, to whom you should reply, to whom the sender sent the e-mail, the date you received it, and also the subjct. It also allows you to reply, reply to all, forward, print, add the sender to your list of contacts, delete the message, report phishing, and show the original message. I didn't find an IP Address, though.

[davekeogh]

You have to click show original and then you get something like this:

X-Gmail-Received: 9951721692fdc71b3626485dad3f30b5a68a5b19
Delivered-To: [email]davekeogh@gmail.com[/url]
Received: by 10.54.152.12 with SMTP id z12cs5170wrd;
Fri, 14 Oct 2005 05:52:48 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.36.120.5 with SMTP id s5mr1101617nzc;
Fri, 14 Oct 2005 05:52:47 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <google@googlecommunity.com>
Received: from quackduck.simpli.biz (quackduck.our-websites.com [208.185.249.150])
by mx.gmail.com with ESMTP id 7si6199443nzo.2005.10.14.05.52.46;
Fri, 14 Oct 2005 05:52:47 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: pass (gmail.com: domain of [email]google@googlecommunity.com[/url] designates 208.185.249.150 as permitted sender)
Received: from apache by quackduck.simpli.biz with local (Exim 4.51)
id 1EQP3G-0004Za-Jf
for [email]davekeogh@gmail.com[/url]; Fri, 14 Oct 2005 05:52:46 -0700
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that was the mail i got from one of my replies...