Phishing Email - Tell-tale Signs



In the example above, the email that appears in Outlook's preview pane looks like a normal email. But there are some tell-tale signs that something is amiss. First, the email does not contain the name of the addressee or any indication of who sent the greeting card - it is vague.

After that it gets a little harder to know what's up without doing some checking. If you hover your mouse over the "click here" link, Outlook will display information about the link. In this case it shows that the link goes to a different website than the greetings.com website and the URL includes an executable file that is probably malicious.

Next you can check the header information to see where the message came from. It should start with Received: from Greetings.com, but instead the headers show that it came from a different address, which tells you the from address was spoofed. You can do this check in Outlook 2007 by right clicking on the email in your main Outlook listing of received emails and then selecting "message options" where you'll find "Internet headers" at the bottom. In Outlook 2003, the process is similar. Highlight the message and on the taskbar click on "tools" and then on "options" to see the headers. If the first "from" address does not match what is displayed, then you can bet that something phishy is going on.
Posted by WEBnME @ 6/02/2007 11:03:00 PM
Permanent Link: http://www.webnme.com/2007/06/phishing-email-tell-tale-signs.asp
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