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Good to see Firefox's anti-phishing works

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Join Date: Apr 2006

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Reputation: John A is a splendid one to behold

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John A

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Vampirical Lurker

Good to see Firefox's anti-phishing works

Apr 27th, 2007

Today I received an email from "Halifax bank" that contained the following:

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Dear halifax customer,

During our regularly scheduled account maintenance and verification procedures, we have detected a slight error in your billing information.

This might be due to either of the following reasons:

1. A recent change in your personal information (i.e.change of address).
2. Submiting invalid information during the initial sign up process.
3. An inability to accurately verify your selected option of payment due to an internal error within our processors.

Please update and verify your information by clicking the link below:

https://www.halifax.co.uk/update.dll?NbankPlaceInfo

If your account information is not updated within 48 hours then your ability to access your account will become restricted.

Thank you

Well, since I didn't even have an account with "halifax bank", it was fairly obvious that this was a scam, and the fact that "halifax" isn't capitalized makes me highly skeptical of the professionality of the whole thing.

Hovering my mouse over the link which appeared to be pointing to an innocent-looking website revealed that the link was in fact pointing to a malicious site, just desperate to steal my money.

Curious to see how the website looked, I clicked on the link. A pleasant surprise awaited me, a message from Firefox came up that warned me that this was a phishing site, and that it was highly dangerous.

Amazingly, this is my first experience of a phishing attack trying to steal my credentials by using a fake website. Generally my mail provider filters everything pretty well, but this message in fact came through my DaniWeb email account, so that is probably the reason it got through.