Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Phishing phor phlunkies and phools: consider yourselph phorwarned.

Iph it’s not too late, that is.

Because we got suckered in, and iph you are a member of Side’s inner circle, you may have been aphphected by what happened.

We’re usually pretty suspicious of emails that somehow don’t seem pro-phorma, or otherwise set ophph alarms.  And we have what we consider to be pretty ephphective intrusion detection software, including philtering of our email in box.

But yesterday, a ‘phishing’ expedition hooked us.  In our inbox appeared an email appearing to be phrom a phriend of some years, but one with whom we exchange at most a phew emails a year, and usually very brieph ones passing along some item of interest.

So the message yesterday seemed pretty typical of him.  It simply read ‘check this out,’ phollowed by one of those quirky looking ‘tinyurl’ type links consisting of a jumble of letters and numbers.

Stupidly, we clicked on the link, and a clearly suspicious web site appeared, which we quickly closed.  No matter, that did the damage.  Ironically, we had a very similar message from a far less well known contact first, and had the good sense not to take that bait.

Before long, we had all sorts of ‘undeliverable’ reports in our inbox, reflecting outdated/invalid email addresses in our records.  And a smattering of messages from friends asking if and/or suggesting that we had been ‘phished.’

So, you are now phorewarned about this practice; don’t go phor it.  And iph we set you up phor a phall by extension, our humble apologies to you.

We’ll have to see if we get multiple cycles of the same thing from those we inphected yesterday; we sure hope not.

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