Hotmail against identity theft
Hotmail occasionally send to members (Hotmail mailboxes) these notification messages explaining the many virtues of their new offerings, and miscellaneous stuff.
This time I noticed a part of the message giving some tips under the heading of “Telltale Signs of Identity Theft Scams“, including this one:
Scroll over the URL. If you see lots of numbers, or a different URL, it’s probably fake.
Which is, by itself, quite sensible. It isn’t foolproof, and there are legitimate addresses that look like that, but can usually serve as a decent indication for people without too much technical knowledge. And a little below they provide a link for more information, with the text:
For more information, go to http://safety.msn.com.
And, well, guess what shows up when you scroll over the URL? Let me tell you, the URL showing up on the status bar is http://g.msn.com/3HMHEN/1892
And, as you may notice, it is a different URL (g.msn.com instead of safety.msn.com). I know it’s the same domain, but it may not be entirely obvious to the average Joe who actually needs those explanations. More than that, it has some odd letters and numbers that don’t make sense, which the same average Joe could clearly identify as lots of numbers.
So someone paying attention would have to conclude this is an attempt at identity theft…
April 26th, 2005 at 17:18 EET | Categories: Security |
Track comments.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
