Cut #6: How to catch phish

The next thing you want to do is look for identifying phrases
or things in the e‑mail, like if they happen to put an e‑mail
address or a phone number or a name of a company in there,
if you Google those things, you are almost certainly going to
find out tons of information about them.
CLEMENTE: Now, Rocky, is there a place that you can report...any place
that’s collecting all of these hoaxes?
OLIVER: There are a couple of places. Snopes.com, which is great for
hoaxes, does some collection of those. There’s another site as
well that if it’s virus‑driven, or like, if you get an attachment
and you just really want to click on that attachment but, um,
but you’re scared to, which is good, then you can go to a site
called the Symantec Antivirus Research Center, which is sarc.
com.
And they, it’s put on by Symantec which obviously writes
Norton Antivirus, you can go there and look up viruses and
Trojans and things like that, like on file names or email
content and things like that. And when you enter it, it will
give you back information about that particular virus or hoax.
And it will tell you what the payload is, what’s the severity,
what’s the damage, and almost always they even have a free
tool that you can use to clean up the virus or Trojan that you
got on your system. If you couldn’t resist the temptation and
you opened the file anyway, they usually have a little fix that
they’ll give you for free.
CLEMENTE: So, George, do you know anybody who’s ever been taken by
one of these Internet scams?
FAULKNER: Well, in regard to phishing, no. You ever gotten sucked into
any of these scams yourself, or...?
CLEMENTE: Well, thank God I haven’t, but I do have members of my
family who often send me virus warnings that are not valid or
they’ll send me.... I even get chain mail. Remember chain
mail?
FAULKNER: Sure.
CLEMENTE: Sure, the St...the Mother Teresa, or the St. Teresa’s prayer,
I still get that. There’s many things that are still floating
around out there, and it really...it really makes me realize just
how vulnerable people still are.
We have some time here at the end for one more item from
our mailbag. A listener mailed us asking, why is all the print
ShortCuts • 1 Sept 2006