Sources : Pune Mirror

Date of Publishing:08/07/2010

Location:Pune

Italic textNETRESULT IS THATYOU ARE PREY!

You can get thousands of IDs by running a search on mass mailing software. Email database CDs are sold for as little as Rs 300.The way out is impractical: go offline for good

Cases of cybercrimes like phishing are rising alarmingly. Most of us don’t know how to deal with it because awareness about the intricacies of the web is low.While businesses that wish to reach many people may know about it, most common internet users do not know that misuse of mass emailing softwares are the point of origin of many cybercrimes. In the light of increasing Nigerian frauds, this is crucial. Such frauds take off with simply an email address gathered randomly from the internet, which the fraudster uses as a target.

A typical Nigerian fraud mail will promises huge sums of money, to get which you have to deposit a small amount as transfer charges and other such made up costs. Many gullible netizens fall for it and end up losing substantial amount of money. Similarly, you have fake job offers from a 'source' that claims to be top firms like Wipro. They typically ask for a certain sum of money as cost for conducting an interview etc.

Fraudsters get email IDs easily by misusing softwares like Atomic Email Hunter, Email Crawler, Email Extractor, and First Email Address Spider. It helps in selecting multiple emails and sending personalised mails. So, a fraudster can 'crawl' into a particular domain and pick up email Ids en masse. These softwares can be installed easily and they have something called a 'keyword' search. If you enter a keyword like 'doctor' or 'student', it will search job sites and other portals and give you a list of valid email Ids randomly. This is possible because people register with various portals and networking sites. In general, the information you put on the internet is fair game.

Niranjan Reddy, cyber crime expert with the Pune Police said that there are people who collect email Ids using such softwares, and then sell it as database CDs, with thousands of valid email addresses for prices as less as Rs 330 or Rs 500. A fraudster can then send a thousand mails and has a good chance of baiting a few victims, who would fall for the email. Counter measures against such activities are tough because we cannot stop people from registering on websites, to begin w i t h . There is nothing m u c h that can be done because it is hard to find out who fished out your info.The easiest way of checking such activity is to verify the legitimacy of the sender and email ID right in your inbox, before before clicking on the link or downloading an attachment.

Web Resource for Times e Paper(For the above mentioned article): http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=MIRRORNEW&BaseHref=PMIR/2010/07/08&PageLabel=1&EntityId=Ar00100&ViewMode=HTML&GZ=T