Phishing.. getting smarter?

[Hessah]

My boss is away today, so I was checking her email..

She just got an email from "Paypal security"

Email address is from -----@paypal.com.au

and the content said "Dear Paypal member, Your account has been flag, click here to verify your details."

The content of the email looks extremely dodgy... but.. how did these ppl get the domain name paypal.com.au to forward these scams out?

I did a quick google search, and people say that if its not address to you by your name, its definitely a scam.. so i deleted the email for her.. in case she clicked on it...

[Hraesvelg]

Its not all that hard to spoof an e-mail address header. They're not actually sending it from that domain, but they're tricking your e-mail reader into saying that's where its come from. Hell, I've gotten spam mails from "my" own address before.

[Hessah]

ohh one of those address book "display" name thingys....

that makes sense..

man I'm more computer literate than anyone else here at work.. if i had to think and convince myself that, that email is fake by looking around for sighs... i can imagine how many other people like my mum falling for things like this!

[Belaslav]

It's relatively easy to do, since all of the stuff you need is alrady installed on the computer, like TelNet.

[Ralath]

I got confused by that once. It looked really legit.

And then I realized I didn't have my PayPal account registered with my Hotmail address.