Thread: A New Phishing Expedition Hit My Inbox This Morning

Originally Posted by Hirlau

Jimmy, a guy who comes in to your life via your computer & wipes out your bank account, is worse to me than the guy who climbs in your window & robs your house while your out. At least I have a small hope of catching the guy in my house. A computer thief is a coward who rarely gets caught.

Agreed. The ACLU and others want privacy protected at all costs. I think any email should be traceable to the sender. While a way around such tracking will be found maybe a few of these phish attacks would be stopped. It can take a long time to undo an identity theft. Just my thoughts.

Anything high-profile like Paypal will always be targeted. It seems to be a blanket approach - my wife doesn't have a Paypal account and she receives these paypal scam emails all the time.

I just take a simple approach to all this: nothing happens with any of my accounts unless I log in and do it myself. Any email, even if real, from any of my accounts just gets ignored and deleted - I don't even open them to read them. If it is a real email and important I'm typically on top of it anyway. Things from Paypal or ebay or facebook etc are not important in my book, and certainly do not warrant me wasting time reading an email from them, even if it is a real one.

When it comes to Paypal in particular I have a special account I link to it - it stays empty until about 1 minute before I need to send funds. When I receive funds I transfer the money out immediately to another account. If anyone ever hacks Paypal they'll find dust and dead spiders in my account, with no way into my real bank.

My real bank getting hacked and my accounts being emptied is my biggest worry - I do a fair bit on online banking. But I figure if the bank's security gets breached they are sue-able if necessary (probably not necessary) - and if someone wants to clean out my mortgage account they are more than welcome to! I use a random string generator programme I wrote to generate a new password every week, so I guess that's at least something.

One last online security thing: install linux.

James.