Anti-spam: Scamming the scammers
Two interesting links in the war against phishers and online scammers.
Metrowest Daily News carries an interview 
with Michael Lamont, a software engineer who has attempted to play along with 419 Nigerian scam artists (“I am an official for Nigerian Oil. I have $140 million. Give me your bank account details and you can have 10%”).
Others have done this before (see the 419 Eater and 419 Baiter web sites), but I was interested to read the statistics about victims and the estimated total financial damage, and to learn that the Nigerian Government “blames Westerners’ greed for their losses”.
Another creative response to Phishing scams (deceptive hyperlinks in emails designed to trick you into revealing financial or personal information) is covered by C|Net News.
It has published an article about RSA Cyota, a company that fights phishing by flooding the scammers’ web sites with bogus user names and passwords so that legitimate information is harder to determine. A spokesperson for RSA Cyota explains:
The technique is called dilution: We generate a list of bogus credentials and feed the Web site with false usernames, passwords and credit card numbers. The fraudster may have obtained 30 genuine credentials out of 300–we are trying to make it less worthwhile and more risky for the fraudster.
Of course, Mail provides some protection against phishing attacks, so careful users can protect themselves.
Recent research on why phishing works (PDF ) , published by Harvard Postdoctoral Fellow Rachna Dhamija, suggests that the majority of users are not careful.
Similar Posts:
- Phishers learn new tricks
- Three Nigerians to scam no more
- Quickies
- SpamSieve 2.4.2
- Nine reasons not to worry about Gmail
Tags: Apple Mail, email, fraud, mail.app, phishing, security, spam
