A home user client forwarded an email requesting that I read it and advise him about the contents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With the subject, \u201cImportant: Don\u2019t lose access to your email account,\u201d the email, purportedly from AOL Broadband Member Services, contained a reminder about a change in how the parent company, Verizon Media, was going to handle data. The email urged the recipient to review the new rules and went on to warn, \u201cotherwise you will not [<\/strong>sic<\/em>] longer have access to new email.<\/strong>\u201d The center of the email contained a bold link to \u201cReview and agree now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, this email was a classic phishing attempt; however, anyone would have thought that the page was a legitimate AOL page upon clicking the link. The coding behind that web page was identical to AOL\u2019s own. The only subtle difference would happen after a person entered an email address or user name and a password.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn\u2019t take my experiment any further because I could see from the website URL that this was not a valid AOL page. The address was https:\/\/aolmaildomain.weebly.com<\/span>. That was the final clue that convinced me this was not a legitimate email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Weebly<\/strong> is a web-hosting service that lets you develop your own website. Because it is owned by Square, the payments processing company (Heliotropic Systems uses Square), it is designed to let people build e-commerce sites quickly and easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It did not take me long to discover the appropriate division to submit a complaint about this particular abuser\u2019s website. I included a brief description of the problem and sent back a copy of the original email after receiving a confirmation of my case. The good news is, less than 24 hours after receiving the request from my client, the bogus website had been removed from Weebly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lesson to be learned: If you think the email you received is suspicious, don\u2019t click anything. Forward it to me for review, and I\u2019ll let you know if it is safe to proceed or delete. Please don\u2019t think, for one minute, that you are bothering me when you do this. I\u2019d rather take a few moments as a precaution than to take hours (or more) later to clean up a mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this case, the consequences for someone who depends on AOL for email would have been a new \u201csilent partner,\u201d diligently reading their emails to harvest personal information \u2014 the first step towards identity theft.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A home user client forwarded an email requesting that I read it and advise him about the contents. With the subject, \u201cImportant: Don\u2019t lose access to your email account,\u201d the email, purportedly from AOL Broadband Member Services, contained a reminder about a change in how the parent company, Verizon Media, was going to handle data. …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,7,3,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cyber-crime","category-everyone","category-home-users","category-phishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":407,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions\/407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}