GONE PFISHING?

IN CYBERSPACE THE BADDIES ARE EVERYWHERE!

Yesterday a friend send an anguished message. She is 'of a certain' age, and she realizes that her prom queen years are past. We've all gone a bit soft here and there. Some of us no longer sport golden tresses, or tresses of any color for that matter, and some of us might weigh a bit more than we would like.  It happens! Still, we don't need to find messages from friends in our in-box directing us to this or that web site where we will learn how to grow hair, get vitamins, lose weight ... and on and on and on. My friend was highly offended that one of her colleagues, a mutual friend, would have the nerve to send her such a link. My friend was hurt and angry.

Well, have faith! Our friends actually never would do such a thing. My friends were victims of a scam known as 'pfishing.'  Pfishing involves one of those cyber baddies somehow gaining access to your email address book and then using that book to circulate a spurious message containing a link to a bogus, usually medical, product to everybody in the book. The message appears to have come from the owner of the address book, who is often a friend or even family member. I do not think there is anything that the person whose address book has been 'pfished' can do. In my experience the pfishing happens once, a bunch of people get upset and the scam moves to its next victim. 

You should not click on the link included in the pfished message.  It might well be a way to infect your own computer with malware of some sort. How can you recognize the message as being the result of pfishing? Well,  to begin with you should not go to any link that comes in your in-box unless you specifically know it to be valid. Next, the pfished message is going to have the name of somebody you know on it, but ask yourself: would my friend be sending me a link to something without any explanation? No, but to be sure, contact your friend and ask them directly. 

I do not know how the baddies gain access to email addresses. I have been told, though, that one way is through innocent emails that you send as a batch, to several people at once. One way to protect those sendings is to use the 'bcc' facility on the address line of your message. Send the message to yourself but  send it to everybody else as a 'bcc.' In this way the list of recipients is not revealed; each recipient sees only her or his address. Sombody bent on nefarious doings will not see the list of addresses. 

I do not know whether malware protectors, such as Malwarebytes (which is considered to be very good and can be downloaded for free from www.malwarebytes.com ), can protect against pfishing, but it is a good idea to have anti malware protection on your computer ..... because there are a lot of baddies lurking in cyberspace!



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