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Road Runner customers: Beware a phishing scam that has returned in recent days. We first saw this in January, and now both email and "snail" mail is circulating asking Road Runner customers to update their billing information. DO NOT CLICK ON THESE LINKS or fill out the forms. (See sample below). In computing, phishing is a criminal activity using social engineering techniques. Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords, bank accounts or credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email, although phone contact has been used as well. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, and technical measures. For example, Internet Explorer 7.0 has built in anti phishing tools. The first recorded mention of phishing is on the alt.online-service.america-online Usenet newsgroup on January 2, 1996, although the term may have appeared even earlier in the print edition of the hacker magazine 2600. The term phishing is a variant of fishing, probably influenced by phreaking, and alludes to the use of increasingly sophisticated lures to "fish" for users' financial information and passwords. More recent phishing attempts have targeted the customers of banks and online payment services. E-mails supposedly from the Internal Revenue Service have also been used to glean sensitive data from U.S. taxpayers. While the first such examples were sent indiscriminately in the hope of finding a customer of a given bank or service, recent trends show that phishers may in principle be able to establish what bank or ISP a potential victim has a relationship with, and then send an appropriate spoofed email to this victim. Targeted versions of phishing have been termed spear phishing. Recenlty an email crafted to look like it was sent from services@rr.com was sent to Road Runner customers attempting to direct customers to a page where they could enter account and banking information to update a database. One way to tell if a link sent to you in an email is legitimate or not is to read what is in the browser address bar if you have clicked on the link. The recent phishing email for Road Runner customer information had a link that looked legitimate in the email but directed a customer to www.update.billing-rr.com/. Your best option is not to click on any link in an email but to open a new browser and type in a known good address like www.rr.com Sites to help protect yourself from phishing. Below is an example of what a recent phishing email looked like. This email even though it has the correct logos and the sender address is made to look like a legitimate address was not sent from Road Runner. In fact it directed a user to a web server based at Beijing Union University with a web page attempting to gather user information. The site has since been taken offline, but now the emails are back, trying to "phish" personal information from you again. 
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Jun-18-2008 - Nothing is more important than keeping your children safe. PC Backup Guidelines May-10-2008 - Author: Dezsi J. More phishing scams Apr-04-2008 - Phishers targeting former Adelphia and 'Valued Road Runner webmail' users Pop-up ads Dec-08-2006 - Tips on preventing pop-up ads. Prevention Dec-08-2006 - The best first steps in securing your PC are running an antivirus program and a firewall. Another critical part of prevention is operating system updates. Removal Tools Dec-08-2006 - A few useful tools for virus removal. These are not substitutes for anti virus software updated and running on your PC. Mail Filtering Software Dec-08-2006 - Software to combat spam in your inbox. Phishing scams Dec-08-2006 - Phishing is a high-tech scam that uses spam or pop-up messages to deceive you into disclosing your credit card numbers, bank account information, Social Security number, passwords, or other sensitive information. What is port scanning Dec-08-2006 - This covers port scanning as used by a virus or worm to infect other PC's. Registry Editor Dec-08-2006 - Always use caution when working with the Windows registry.
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