[X Newbies] Vicious Spam

[Andy Carroll]

>Can anyone explain how spammers can give you an url that sure as 
>hell looks legitimate, all the way down to the .gov domain?


In my old Eudora, which isn't always terribly clever about displaying 
HTML in e-mail, the address came through like this:

>  http://www.fdic.gov/idverify/cgi-bin/index.htm

And the next line was this:

>  <http://www.fdic.gov
@211.191.224.108:3180/index.htm>

The first address is the displayed one, and the second is the one 
that you'll be sent to if you click on the first. Note that they're 
not the same. This scam takes advantage of a vulnerability discovered 
in Internet Explorer discovered a couple months ago.

There's more info at http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/36402, and 
there's probably more recent info out there. I'm not sure whether 
there's a fix yet.

Andy
-- 


Andy Carroll
andy.carroll at sympatico.ca
Toronto, Canada