Appletell

An e-mail has been making the rounds recently, aimed specifically at MobileMe users. Disguised as a billing e-mail, it asks users to enter billing information by clicking a link to a website that is clearly not Apple-related.

“We were unable to process your most recent payment. Did you recently change your bank, phone number or credit card?” the e-mail asks. It then has a link to a page to enter said information. Users may be fooled because of the authenticity of the e-mail and the fact that all other links on the page point to official apple.com pages.

Details and tips on how to avoid phishing e-mails after the break.

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For the first time in Apple’s history, an Apple program is the target of a Phishing scam.  Recently, thousands of iTunes users have received fraudulent emails, asking them for personal information including credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, mother’s maiden name, and more.  Andrew Lochart of Proofpoint, inc. expressed his surprise with the attempt.  “We’ve gotten used to seeing the usual companies and brands attacked,” he said, “like PayPal, eBay and Citibank. But we’ve never seen Apple as the target”.  For Apple, the Phishing attempt should in a way come as a complement, as Phishers would never bother with a small-time site.  Apple’s recent success in both the music industry and computer industry can be blamed as the reason for the attack.

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PayPal was considering blocking Safari users from accessing their website due to security risks that the browser has a few days ago. Because Safari doesn’t have any built-in support for anti-phishing, it was considered very unsafe by PayPal. I can bring Safari and PayPal users good news: Safari has been spared from PayPal’s list of soon-to-be-banned web browsers. I have a feeling there was a lot of controversy about this decision; considering Safari now affects Windows, OS X and the iPhone.

PayPal has definitely raised awareness that Safari is less safe to use than Firefox which has phishing prevention methods. Hopefully, Apple can integrate and learn some of Mozilla’s security techniques into the next version of Safari. PayPal will still be blocking “old browsers and old operating systems” - a.k.a. Internet Explorer 4 on Windows 98 - a situation I’m sure few of you have.

Via [MacUser]

Citing an increase in attempted Phishing attempts on PayPal’s user database, PayPal says there is a very good chance that older versions of Internet Explorer (IE 4 and later), along with the all versions of Safari, may be blocked from the site.  Safari and older versions of IE lack phishing blocks, and in an arena in which large amounts of money are transferred daily, those are imperative.  The company says that PayPal users will be warned of their use of an old browser, and eventually blocked, at a time not announced.  “At PayPal, we are in the process of reimplementing controls which will first warn our customers when logging in to PayPal of those browsers that we consider unsafe,” says a PayPal employee. “Later, we plan on blocking customers from accessing the site from the most unsafe—usually the oldest—browsers.” Although other popular browsers such as Firefox and Opera also lack Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layers (EV SSL, a simple anti-phisher), they have both announced plans to implement such technologies.  As of now, Apple has no such plans made public. 

Via [MacWorld]

Millions of people are victims to e-mail fraud and fake websites known as “phishing”. PayPal users are vulnerable to phishing all the time. For those who don’t know what PayPal phishing is, it’s basically a replica of PayPal’s login screen, and when you enter your details, instead of logging you in, your details are sent to the hacker who created the phishing site. Thankfully, PayPal has created a guide to “Safer Browsers”. But you won’t find Safari mentioned on the list of safe browsers.

Safari isn’t one of the safest browsers as many of you will know. Firefox is probably the safest alternative available on all platforms. In fact Safari lacks more security features than, dare I say it, Internet Explorer 7. Apple should keep updating Safari with new security fixes and features if they want their browser to succeed on both Windows and Mac. Safari has seen some great improvements, partially from WebKit updates. I want to continue seeing Safari get updates, so that it can compete with the leading browsers like Firefox. I’m a fan of Firefox’s compatibility, but I prefer Safari’s performance on the Mac.

Via [TUAW]