Phishing Email Attachments

Here is another PayPal Phishing Email – (Shown below).  The thing about this particular Phishing email is that it comes with an attachment that these scammers want me to open.  The attachment is an html (Phishing) form probably laden with a virus trap, that when opened would put some kind of virus or Trojan on my computer as I filled out my personal information into the (Phishing) form. 

Here is how I recognize this email to be a Phishing scam.  

• First of all, it’s like this scammer is a novice or isn’t even trying, the email is very poorly written for a real PayPal email.
• There are no PayPal graphics on the email like PayPal uses.
•  The To: email field is hidden using BCC, so it was probably sent to multiple recipients, instead of directly to my email address.
• It doesn’t say my name anywhere on the email like PayPal does.
• PayPal doesn’t send you attachment forms to fill out.
• The scammer misspelled PayPal and put PayPaI (with an I) instead.
• The scammer is sending this from a fake email address, but the fake email address he used is from CNN.com
• It’s TO: an email address that I don’t use for PayPal. 
• When I go to the real PayPal website, by typing the real address in, and sign into my account, as I already knew, no problems at PayPal.  

Although this is a poor example of a PayPal Phishing email, I really wanted to stress the attachment that came with it.   Be VERY CAREFULL opening attachments, because viruses, worms, zombie trojans and many other nasty programs can be hidden in email attachments.  

• First of all, don’t open attachments unless you know for sure who they are from, and you trust them.  Even friends make mistakes.
• Do not open .exe (executable) files at all unless you are absolutely sure of the source.  Just delete them. 
• Don’t open the attachment, instead, save it to your hard drive, update your virus scanner, and do a virus scan on it before opening it. 

 ——————–BEGAN PHISHING EMAIL———–

—– Original Message —–
From: “PayPaI” <msgcenter@cnn.com>
To: <user739@.com>
Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 10:32 PM
Subject: New Message

     In order to protect your account from unauthorized access,
 we have set a limit of 3 unsuccessful attempts.
 Unfortunately, you have just reached that critical number of attempts,
 so your access to Online Banking has been locked for security purposes.

    Please download the form attached to this email and open it in a web browser.
 Once opened, you will be provided with steps to restore your account access.
 We appreciate your understanding as we work to ensure account safety.

             Copyright 1999-2009 PayPaI. All rights reserved.

—————————END PHISHING EMAIL———————