I came across multiple emails in my inbox which were talking about my Paypal account being blocked. The mails had a subject line as "Your Papal account is suspended". I immediately sensed it as phishing email. As earlier I had received emails indicating about payments that I made using Paypal which were phishing emails and after that I had been more careful when going through the email with respect to Paypal.

This email was not having my name and has started like "Dear Paypal Member", usually it should have been addressed to me on my name. The email also had lot a warning kind of message like "Your account will be suspended" "Click here to activate your account". I just moved my mouse pointer over the link and observed that the link is not actually taking me to the Paypal website. This confirmed that its a phishing email. The link pointed to the URL something like (http :// www. worldangler.com/~paypal/paypal.fr/fr/...)

I still visited the link just to see how the attacker had created the webpage. It appeared as shown below:



I advice to all the readers that while going through the emails from bank/paypal/online financial websites please have a suspicious view at the back of your mind and look for such signs of a phishing attack. Please "Do not click" on any links in the email. Its always better to open the browser and directly type in the email address of the bank/paypal etc. whatever service you are concern of. Then visit the website. This will delay the process but will be more safe.

Paypal had a interesting tutorial on teaching to guess the phishing email correctly. Please see below webpage to have a look at the tutorial that teaches how to spot phishing.

https://www.paypal.com/fightphishing

Happy learning

Since couple of weeks back Microsoft has been working on secret Operation B49 to wipe out Waledac botnet. Waledac is one of the largest botnets active and having major presence in US and European countries. This botnet is believed to be actively sending spam messages and had capacity to send billions of spam mails per day. Microsoft's observation concluded that in just 18 days time the botnet has sent more than 650 million spam emails just to hotmail accounts. This operation ended successfully on Wednesday.

Researches from the University of Mannheim in Germany and Technical University Vienna in Austria published a research paper on Waledec botnet and showcased a method to control this botnet. Microsoft contacted those researchers this year and planned a major offensive against the Waledec botnet by planning to take control of all the command an control severs which were in hundreds and distributed across the globe.

Microsoft legal team took courts permission from District Court of Eastern Virginia. This was quite difficult but finally they managed to get the permission to temporary shutdown almost 277 Internet domains believed to be run by the Waledac bot for command and control.

This helped to cut off traffic between Waledac servers and zombies from source level. This disconnected the hacker groups connection between them and the zombie computers across the globe. Now remains the job of cleaning the zombie's.

We appreciate this move by Microsoft and congratulate them for able to get through the legal hurdles and making such a huge attempt to stop the new edge problem.

Now we have to wait and watch the gradual slow down of the botnet traffic and its after effect. We are sure this will surely have major effect on the botnets business. Even though it may be temporary but it is significant enough. We know that this will not stop these hackers all together but doing such action will definitely make their job more difficult. One should keep on doing such activity repeatedly to dismantle the hackers functioning network.