Questions regarding phishing

[geeyesgee]

I got my first phishing e-mail, the one suposedly from Chase Bank. It was a bit laghable because it came through my Hotmail account and refered to me as my handle, and I don't have a Chase Bank account especially because I'm in Canada.

Well my curiousity got the better of me and I clicked on the link just to see where it led to. Someone told me I shouldn't have done that because I could have gotten a virus or a trojan. I didn't type anything into the fields and I left the site.

My question are: is it possible to get a virus/trojan via a page using Safari? would it not show up on the downloads log? Also, I was using Entourage to access my Hotmail account — would it have affected that? the e-mail had no apparent attachment.

Everything's fine with my computer, just wondering.

 

[TheMonarch]

No. Don't worry. PC+IE only

 

[tag]

Yeah virus/trojan wise you don't have to worry. You are using a mac with safari so if the link was to say a trojan program you would have to manually download it and execute it, and even then those programs would be for a windows machine, not a Mac. Though with phishing scams that usually is not even the case. Their main goal is to get you to follow the link, and then enter your banking info on their copied fake page so that they would then have access to your account themselves.

 

[geeyesgee]

Thanks for the reassurances. Just to be safe, I threw out all my cookies.

 

[grapes911]

You should forward the email to abuse@chase.com (or whatever email address they use to collect fraud emails). The more everyone reports these things, the more companies such as chase can try to shutdown the phishers.

 

[cslewis]

If you open one of these things in VPC, can your infected windows 'machine' screw with your mac?

 

[grapes911]

If you open one of these things in VPC, can your infected windows 'machine' screw with your mac?

Not really. Something in VPC cannot generally hurt your Mac. But, generally, opening a website cannot hurt your mac either. So I wouldn't worry about it.

 

[WildCowboy]

Another thing to note with phishing e-mails is that if you click on the link or load any remote images within the e-mail, the phisher can set things up so that they know you opened the e-mail. This gets your address added to a list of known valid addresses, and can increase your spam dramatically.

I have Mail set up to not load images by default...most of the time you don't need them, and it only takes a single click to load them if you do.