Saturday, April 27, 2013

Phishers use to take pride in their work....

Maybe I'm just getting old.  But Phishers used to take a little pride in their work, writing in actual English and having something plausible in the message.  No more.  I just got this:

Dear Duke webmail User, 
 
There are security check on our Duke webmail database system and have you online access disabled, pending the confirmation of you sign details. 

Click the link below to confirm and type in the confirmation number: 1265-6778-8250 along with various informations in the portal of entry. 

Click here http://****** 

Please ensure you username and password details are correctly, to avoid losing your email account access preturnally. However, your access would be restored after this confirmation.

 Duke Security Department. 

2013® services are provided by Duke.

Seriously? The email is "from" a young woman at Baylor Medical School (not her fault, obviously they are spoofing her email address).  But why would a young woman at Baylor Medical School be sending this out?  Wouldn't you at least take the time to spoof a Duke email address?

The sad part is that I'm sure that some of my...shall we say..."senior" colleagues clicked through on this.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"The sad part is that I'm sure that some of my...shall we say..."senior" colleagues clicked through on this"

Oh yeah! As I always say, education and intelligence are not synonymous.

Karl said...

Oh, they're bright enough. Everyone has their lacunae.

Gerardo said...

What's surprising is that they send it to Duke at all, when UNC has professors with a proven track record of falling for such things.

Ben said...

The reason for this has already been explained elsewhere (but I don't have the link available) -- smart people may investigate a plausible but suspicious email and get the phisher in trouble. So, the phisher just wants to collect the credentials of gullible people. To do this, he tries to craft an email that will be instantly discarded by smart people, but will still get some gullible people to click through.