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02 July 2010, 10:22

Phishing under the name of Wikipedia

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A large number of spam emails are currently prompting their recipients to verify an alleged Wikipedia account by clicking on a link that appears to point to the official Wikipedia site. The emails contain such texts as "Someone from the IP address 112.135.3.205 has registered the account 'iamjustsendingthisleter' with this e-mail address on the English Wikipedia", where the IP address corresponds to that of the spamming computer (bot), and the alleged Wikipedia account is the spam recipient's email account.

As usual with HTML phishing emails, the included links appear to lead to the trusted service but when clicked, they take users to infected websites that the perpetrators may have injected with all sorts of dubious content, for example pill advertisements, malicious JavaScript code, or both.

Users should take the usual precaution not to navigate to popular pages via links in suspicious emails and should instead use previously bookmarked links to visit sites. Not even the link preview in the status line of many email programs or web browsers offers guaranteed security because URL characters can, for example, be substituted with similar characters that, at first glance, appear identical.

(crve)

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