Talking with my daughter about BlizzCon and Pandas and Pokemon companion pet battles naturally raised the level of interest in World of Warcraft around the house.
And, hey presto, what should show up in my mail box but an offer for seven free days of World of Warcraft!
Come play for free!
I mean, I get offers like this from games now and again. I have even gotten such offers from Blizzard. So no alarms went off in my head… not right away.
And then, as I clicked on the button, I realized that I was not looking at the email inbox associated with my Blizzard Battle.net account. This was the email account where I only every get PHISHING ATTEMPTS.
Fortunately, the site had already been flagged as a forgery.
Web Forgery Alert!
Sure enough, I went back to mouse over the “PLAY FREE NOW” button and the URL is directed me to was obviously bogus, something I would have normally noticed if I had not been in something of a BlizzCon state of mind. They hit me at just the right moment. The phishing attempt literally came in about 30 minutes before I opened up my email. But I was saved from any potential trouble by the good people at Mozilla.
This is why I tell my wife and mother-in-law not to use Internet Explorer
Though it does make me wonder how much those good people at Mozilla know about my browsing habits, and that if they are watching, that site I was at the other night after my wife went to bed was a total accident. I was looking up one of the works of W. Somerset Maugham and how I ended up on that other site is a complete mystery to me.
Anyway, be wary and look at those URLs before you click!
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
I think that’s what they implemented private browsing for. ;)
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/21/privatebrowsing.jpg/
LikeLike
I keep getting phishing attempts for Runescape this week. I didn’t realize there was money to be made stealing Runescape accounts.
LikeLike
I was looking up one of the works of W. Somerset Maugham…
I see what you did there, lol…
LikeLike
Mozilla gets their info by pinging Google, which is how I had the whole kerflaffle last week when a site on my blogroll got hacked and started serving out a malware-ridden icon on their RSS feed.
LikeLike
As I recall, Google does, or did, contribute heavily to the Mozilla code base as well.
LikeLike
My sister who is a technophobe is so scared of the internet that she won’t even buy stuff from Amazon. I am fairly tech savvy and I take pride in my ability to distinguish precisely which Eastern European websites it is safe to give my credit card details to. I wonder which of us is more likely to fall prey to a phishing attempt. Probably me, hubris being what it is.
LikeLike
How is Chrome for security? I had to use it a couple of times this weekend because my usual browser refused to deal with a couple websites (/wave gPotato). I thought Chrome was significantly faster and has a very nice, clean look.
LikeLike
So…you rely on your mail client to catch these things. You don’t check the Full Header of messages like this regardless of what your “gut feeling” is doing?
Reminds me of an Engineer at work who has a PhD. After I.T. told everyone not to click any links in any emails for any reason, he did exactly that…and I.T. disabled his email for 2 weeks.
Good luck in the future!
TQQdles™,
Dolnor Numbwit
Eternal Newbie
LikeLike
@Dolonor – Generally I rely on the fact that the WoW phishing emails go to an email address not associated with my WoW account, which is something I said in the post.
After that, usually just mousing over the embedded URL is enough to show that a phishing scam is bogus.
Actually going to the full email headers… almost never required.
So yeah, one slip after a a couple hundred tries and I have to endure some smug know-it-all who can’t even be bothered to read what I write. Reminds me of… the internet!
LikeLike