Skip to main content

How to Spot a Phishing Site

I just got an e-mail from Bank of America:

During our regularly scheduled account maintenance and verification procedures, we have detected a slight error in your billing information. This might be due to either of the following reasons:

1. A recent change in your personal information (i.e.change of address).
 2. Submiting invalid information during the initial sign up process.
 3. The services look that was changed recently:

[Banking Log-In]

Security Advisory,
 Bank Of America .

*Important*

failure to update your account at least 24hrs of notice might lead to account being locked and access will be restricted.

I'll ignore the fact that I do not have a Bank of America account for the sake of this post, as that's just too easy.

So let's review the signs thus far:

Sign #1: "Either" of the following reasons, followed by three, not two, reasons.
Sign #2: Poor grammar: The services look that was changed recently
Sign #3: Poor punctuation: failure to update your account at least 24hrs of notice might lead to account being locked and access will be restricted.
Sign #4: The fact that the URL in the e-mail resolved to this site in Poland, which is hardly where I believe the Bank of America is located:
http://www.gis.gov.pl/mambots/content/acc/index.htm

So I clicked on it (having a Mac gives you little fear when it comes to checking out phishing sites) and got a relatively legit looking Bank of America login page. Not running in SSL.

Sign #5: No SSL for username & password.

I "signed on" with a bogus name and password, and lo and behind, it accepted it!

Sign #6: A completely made up username and password somehow work.

Now that I'm authenticated, the URL has changed to include both the username and password which I provided:

http://www.gis.gov.pl/mambots/content/acc/update.html?Access_ID=phisher&Current_Passcode=welcome

Sign #7: Your password shows up - in clear text - in the URL

Now I am presented with a form that is asking for all kinds of personal information - checking account number, SSN, online ID (which I just provided), ATM card number and PIN, and bank routing number.

Sign #8: Your bank asks YOU for its routing number.

At this point, if I just submit the page without providing any information, it goes on to the next step.

Sign #9: Not a lick of validation is included anywhere in the site.

Finally - the inspiration for this post - is one of the last pieces of information that the site asked me for:

Third from the bottom, I am asked to provide my Father's Maiden Name - a piece of information so secure, that not even he knows what it is!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hey Scott
Great post! Its scary to think that folks still blindly fill out forms providing all sorts of great info. I was reading, an admittedly old article (Nov 2006) stating that 1 in 10 people get suckered in by these sites. Come on people get educated!
May 20, 2008 at 9:41 PM
Scott said…
I agree that people need to be a bit more cautious, but I think that there's a generation/education gap at work here in the phishers' favor.

Every time I go back home, I spend at least 10 minutes deleting a wide array of .exe files from my dad's Mac Mini. Apparently, he clicks on any link that offers to remove spyware and viruses, even after my repeated warnings not to. At least MacOS harmlessly lines them up on the desktop.

- Scott -
May 20, 2008 at 9:49 PM
Oyvind Isene said…
Cool. I figured I could contribute with some personal information of my own, but Firefox warns me of "Suspected web forgery" when I try to open the url. Maybe I will fool around later at home.
May 21, 2008 at 2:34 AM
Unknown said…
"Father's Maiden Name" that is classic. But don't forget to fill out ALL of your mother's and father's "Middles" names !!
May 21, 2008 at 6:34 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Custom Export to CSV

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. I've been quite busy lately, and just have not had the time that I used to. We're expecting our 1st child in just a few short weeks now, so most of my free time has been spent learning Lamaze breathing, making the weekly run to Babies R Us, and relocating my office from the larger room upstairs to the smaller one downstairs - which I do happen to like MUCH more than I had anticipated. I have everything I need within a short walk - a bathroom, beer fridge, and 52" HD TV. I only need to go upstairs to eat and sleep now, but alas, this will all change soon... Recently, I was asked if you could change the way Export to CSV in ApEx works. The short answer is, of course, no. But it's not too difficult to "roll your own" CSV export procedure. Why would you want to do this? Well, the customer's requirement was to manipulate some data when the Export link was clicked, and then export it to CSV in a forma
76 comments
Read more

Refreshing PL/SQL Regions in APEX

If you've been using APEX long enough, you've probably used a PL/SQL Region to render some sort of HTML that the APEX built-in components simply can't handle. Perhaps a complex chart or region that has a lot of custom content and/or layout. While best practices may be to use an APEX component, or if not, build a plugin, we all know that sometimes reality doesn't give us that kind of time or flexibility. While the PL/SQL Region is quite powerful, it still lacks a key feature: the ability to be refreshed by a Dynamic Action. This is true even in APEX 5. Fortunately, there's a simple workaround that only requires a small change to your code: change your procedure to a function and call it from a Classic Report region. In changing your procedure to a function, you'll likely only need to make one type of change: converting and htp.prn calls to instead populate and return a variable at the end of the function. Most, if not all of the rest of the code can rem
5 comments
Read more

Logging APEX Report Downloads

A customer recently asked how APEX could track who clicked “download” from an Interactive Grid.  After some quick searching of the logs, I realized that APEX simply does not record this type of activity, aside from a simple page view type of “AJAX” entry.  This was not specific enough, and of course, led to the next question - can we prevent users from downloading data from a grid entirely? I knew that any Javascript-based solution would fall short of their security requirements, since it is trivial to reconstruct the URL pattern required to initiate a download, even if the Javascript had removed the option from the menu.  Thus, I had to consider a PL/SQL-based approach - one that could not be bypassed by a malicious end user. To solve this problem, I turned to APEX’s Initialization PL/SQL Code parameter.  Any PL/SQL code entered in this region will be executed before any other APEX-related process.  Thus, it is literally the first place that a developer can interact with an APEX p
1 comment
Read more