This morning at the College where I work (http://selkirk NULL.ca/) I got a “phishing (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Phishing)” email. It appeared to be from CIBC (http://cibc NULL.com/), a large Canadian bank that I do not use. It asked:

We offer you secure access to your online banking and investment accounts. As part of the sign on process, you may occasionally be prompted to answer one of the Personal Verification Questions you have set up.

You can see the full fraudulent email by following this link. DO NOT ENTER YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION.

I get the email. It’s full of official-looking imagery and wording. They want me to sign in with my CIBC credentials.

I “view source” to check the HTML. Sure enough, they’re taking the images right from cibc.com.

<img width="158" src="http://www.cibc.com/ca/img/sites/pagetitle-en.gif" height="19" alt="CIBC Websites" border="0"/>


Looks official, looks official, looks official… There’s only one little thing that looks phishy:

<p>
<a href="http://ns.salmor.com.ec/online-banking/olbtxn/authentication/PreSignOn.cibclocale=en_CA.htm">Verify My Account Information</a>
</p>

As you can tell, it sends the collected info elsewhere.

I clicked the link just to see what it would do, and got a big warning from Firefox 3, Opera 9 and IE 8 beta.

Firefox 3's Blocked Phishing Site Warning

Opera 9's Blocked Phishing Site Warning

Internet Explorer 8 Beta's Blocked Phishing Site Warning

This is good. I think IE 7 has something similar, but there are lots of people in the College using IE6 or worse still.

Firefox 2 on Windows had no such warning.

An example of a spoofed website.

So. If you are still using Internet Explorer less than version 7, Firefox less than version 3, or Opera less than version 9, please update immediately.

• Upgrade Firefox (http://getfirefox NULL.com/)
• Upgrade Opera (http://opera NULL.com/)
• Upgrade Internet Explorer (http://www NULL.microsoft NULL.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow NULL.mspx)