Yesterday I've received messages by Ebay and by the company that hosts the ntrack.com server that the server was being used for a phishing scheme involving Ebay.
Apparently some hacker planted a few pages on the web server that with an address like ntrack.com/signin.ebay.com. I assume (I made a backup copy of the pages but I didn't test where they pointed) that as with any phishing scheme the page mocked the login page of Ebay, users landed on the page after clicking on a link in a spammed email message that appeared to come from Ebay and entered their login info enabling the phishers to steal their login and password. The mocked Ebay page was already active on the server, and it looked like they were also preparing a mockup of Paypal... where real money is involved.
These days having a server that sits on the internet is a very scary proposition.
I always wonder when seeing this kind of things why people can't find more productive (not to mention legal) ways to spend their time. At least this time it wasn't as ugly as a day in august 2004 when the server was hacked and the main page (or was it the forum main page?) was replaced by a page that made a myriad of gay-porn popup pages appear.
Comments (2)
I had the same problem a few months ago. Unbeknownst to me for a couple of months, someone put up a front, I think it was for a bank (Bank of America I think). So in ftp, I renamed the folders, properly chmodded stuff and I pretty sure it's solid now.
Posted by technoid | August 5, 2007 2:00 AM
Posted on August 5, 2007 02:00
"I always wonder when seeing this kind of things why people can't find more productive (not to mention legal) ways to spend their time."
I would argue that it was very productive and indeed likely to more so had it not been spotted.
Unfortunately one of the reasons why criminal activity like this is allowed to proliferate is because of naive assumptions like yours above.
There is no reason to assume the internet is any different from our usual analogue world. The Internet is administered by humans and they can be a pretty nasty bunch of bastards.
Personally I would love to think of the real world and its digital offspring as mirroring my own circle of friends and family: Loving, caring, considerate and trustworthy. But we can't pick and choose everyone we associate with in life so it's inevitable, in fact it's a solid guarantee, that each of us will be taken advantage of many times in our lives, often without even knowing it.
Our greatest protection is to consistently have this fact uppermost in our mind. And of course helpful information of the latest scams such as you've provided here.
Using a good browser, (not microsoft), and checking links against your own bookmarks is also a good assest.
Opera, which I use, has a good Password Manager and built in Fraud Protection that at the click of a button will check any link with it's own database. I imagine Firefox probably has something along similar lines.
Greed and corruption has been with us since the beginning and is certain to remain so. And to behave Legally is a voluntary act. There is absolutely no obligation for any of us to do so.
Apologies for turning this into a sermon but to deny or not fully comprehend natural human behaviour at all levels is to leave yourself exposed.
Let's evolve together and we may beat them yet.
:D
Posted by Voice of Reason G.k.W | September 16, 2007 9:35 PM
Posted on September 16, 2007 21:35