Phishing

Bad, bad, bad .... at my Birthday my account at Hostmonster has been suspended due to a phishing attack. Instead of helping me and perform the necessary work to prevent from happening again, they just sent me this notice (website deactivated) after I asked and after my further inquiries sent me a doc with info on what to do and after I will do it, they will un-suspend me ....

There are several issues here. They state my account was safe at the beginning, but after I installed scripts (by their installation system though) I did not work on safeguarding the environment. Well I am not a system admin, nor do I want to become one, so working with their installations should be ok. At least they should help after this mess up, that is what I think.

I have had now 2 major incidents in the last few weeks at Hostmonster, first no backups available and now this. Chancing all now to Fatcow, although not totally preventing from happening again, is what I will be doing. But it also made me think of how to improve backups and more secure sites. Will work on that.

What is Phishing:

In the field of computer security, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT Administrators are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting public. Phishing is typically carried out by e-mail or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Even when using server authentication, it may require tremendous skill to detect that the website is fake. Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to fool users, and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical security measures.

A phishing technique was described in detail in 1987, and the first recorded use of the term "phishing" was made in 1996. The term is a variant of fishing, probably influenced by phreaking, and alludes to baits used to "catch" financial information and passwords.