{"id":75,"date":"2008-05-07T00:01:18","date_gmt":"2008-05-07T07:01:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=75"},"modified":"2008-05-06T22:16:37","modified_gmt":"2008-05-07T05:16:37","slug":"i-am-a-fool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=75","title":{"rendered":"I am a Fool"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeah, I’ve written about it often enough. I know how it works. But call it stupid timing. I fell victim to a phishing scam. O the shame!<\/em>
\n
\nIn case you don’t know, a phishing (say “fishing”) scam is where you get an e-mail message that purports to be one thing but is another. Often the e-mail leads you to a web site that looks like the real thing, but in fact tricks you into divulging things like account names, passwords, PINs, and other vital information.<\/p>\n

Normally I don’t fall prey to this type of scam. I get e-mail that looks like it’s from my bank, but it’s not. The give-away is visiting the phishing web site, which looks like the real thing and may even use the real graphics, but it asks some questions you wouldn’t expect, such as your social security number, account password, or mother’s maiden name.<\/p>\n

In my case, I just happened to just have purchased something on eBay. I received a confirmation from the vendor with the shipping information. The next e-mail I got looked like it was from eBay itself. It contained a link to “www.ebay.com” but the link actually went to another page. Before I knew it, I had typed in my eBay account name and password on the bogus page. In fact, I noticed that the page wasn’t eBay at all as I clicked the button to “log in.”<\/p>\n

I felt terrible.<\/p>\n

Immediately I went to eBay \u2014 the real site \u2014 and changed my password. That saved me. Just for good measure, I changed my password on every other web site I use. I replaced my old passwords, which were typically 8 characters long, with the new ones between 10 and 16 characters long. So far, after a day or two, I’ve not noticed any unusual activities on the any of my web sites, so whoever ended up with the password has useless information.<\/p>\n

The reason I’m writing about this is to tell you that it could happen to you, too<\/em>!
\nNormally, I’m quite astute about these things, but it was the timing that got me. I had just bought something on eBay so it made sense that they might send me a message. Oh well.<\/p>\n

What’s even more surprising to me is that the web browser’s anti-phishing filter didn’t catch the bogus link. The link said “www.ebay.com” but the actual page was something else that had the word “ebay” in it. I’m puzzled as to how this one got by, but that’s not the point. The point is to be careful out there, no matter how good you think you are with computers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeah, I’ve written about it often enough. I know how it works. But call it stupid timing. I fell victim to a phishing scam. O the shame!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}