Charles on… anything that comes along

I’m not sure I agree with the answers at http://survey.mailfrontier.com/survey/phishing_uk.html. I mean, perhaps they’re right, but I hope I’m not giving anything too much away..

Oh, stop now and go and do the test - to see how easily you’d be taken in by phishing emails, or how overly mistrustful you’d be of legitimate emails; it may or may not have a mixture of both.

…Back now? I’d say that the second, from “Cross Country Bank”, has to be a fake.

Here’s why:

1) From is apparently accountservices@crosscountrybank.com

2) URL it wants you to go to is apparently https://ccbonline.crosscountrybanking.com/ccbonline.cgi

Notice the difference? crosscountrybank.com; crosscountrybanking.com .

OK, so whois shows them as belonging to the same people. Still pretty stupid to have two different domains in the email. It’s practices like that which lead to people being phished. That, and their over-belief in what comes over wires.

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On a talk show not long ago, a prominent African-American declared that the Roosevelt administration had closely support Hitler until the Pearl Harbour attack. The journalists on his panel made no objection to this. Had none of them heard of Lend-Lease, hadn’t they read about FDR, were they unaware of Nazi hostility toward the United States? Can these high-finish, well-tailored and hairstyled interviewers know so little about history?

America is, of course, the land of the present; its orientation is toward the future. That Americans should care so little about the past is fetching, even endearing, by why should we take the judgements of these splendid-looking men and women seriously? That they had had “backgrounders” or briefings we may take for granted. One is reluctant to conclude that their omniscience is a total put-on. But this, too, may be beside the point. The principal aim of these opinion-makers is to immerse us again and again in a marinade of “correctness” or respectability.

(Saul Bellow, in a piece first published in Forbes magazine, September 1992, reprinted in The Independent 9 April 2005.)

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