In the phish-tank

What happens when you fall for a phishing scam?

If you use a great browser like Firefox then you'll see something like this graphic.

I hope you can imagine the sense of surprise and relief, seeing that screen. I had just been rescued from who knows what malicious software.

I don't know who to thank, but whoever does the research and puts together these lists of phishing scam sites, thank you!

After the initial surprise I felt a need to do something constructive about this. I Google'd for this text:

phishing report

That quickly took me to the US CERT web site: http://www.us-cert.gov/nav/report_phishing.html

Here's the short version for those in a hurry:

Forward the email to this address phishing-report@us-cert.gov

For those with a little more time on their hands, you can be thorough and send the mail headers as well. This could help the researchers track down where the spam is really coming from. The web site lists instructions for getting this information from Outlook Express, which many people have installed on their Windows system.

I have the regular Outlook used in many business settings. For those of us using Outlook:

1. Open a message window for this email
2. Go to the View menu, then select Options
3. At the bottom of the "Message Options" window you'll see 'Internet headers:'. The text box to the right of that contains the headers you want to send. Just park your cursor in that box, press Ctrl+A on your keyboard to select all the text, Ctrl+C to copy it, then send an email to the phishing report address I mentioned above.

Here's what I did on the next several messages (yes, you have a chance to practice). I forwarded the phishing message to phishing-report@us-cert.gov. At the top of the message window I put:

Message headers (message body follows): 

then pasted the message headers on the following line.

I don't know how much this will help but it's more constructive than simply being insulted.

Remember to check those seat belts and use a browser that protects you against phishing scams!