Google Blogoscoped

Forum

Google Account Phishing Attempt Using Orkut  (View post)

Colin Colehour [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, July 24, 2008
15 years ago3,906 views

You always get the cool spam messages. All I get are messages saying that I won the Google Lottery. Problem is the check always gets lost in the mail. :(

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

I've just checked my spam folder for the first time in ages* and realised there's a ton of the stuff with "iPhone 3G" in the subject. Those crafty spammers...

*Ever since marking all my spam as read a couple of months ago, I'm so much more productive because I don't feel the need to clear that spam counter!

Varun [PersonRank 3]

15 years ago #

I got phished, and guess what, I lost my Google account :(

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

[put at-character here]Colin

Same thing with me! What postal service are they using, I keep having to pay them extra to use their priority post service!

Ianf [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

What's intriguing here is not so much the social engineering context, but the utterly-black hole of apparent no-consequences for the spammer. Google knows, or ought to know about, the identities of those who swallowed that hook, line and sinker; presumably also the identity of the spammer; definitely her/his/tory, etc. So it ought to be able to do something more about it, than merely close the page and/or account; AND TO PUBLICIZE the extent to which it is pursuing the (would-be)-criminals. Not to mention to prevent or by-defail-preempt[*] creation of any named entity within a service, that has this, or other Google servicename, or other known phish-bait keyword in its title.

[^*] see the end of (by-analogous)
http://switchabit.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/bitly/#comment-74

[...] preempt the use of selected/ high-profile phish-bait custom labels such as as

http://bit.ly/paypal

Jonathan Marks [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Thanks for the time and trouble you went into fishing out the truth. A warning to us all.

Aashiq [PersonRank 0]

15 years ago #

Thanks Mate! For posting this valuable information.

Pratheep [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Even the url says Orkult and not Orkut...

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Pratheep, of course, I forgot to point that out. That's probably because Google Page Creator doesn't allow you to create address with Google property names in them – i.e. Google, Gmail, Orkut, etc. (Well, not any more anyway.)

Christian Poulsen [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

[put at-character here] Tony Ruscoe

> Ever since marking all my spam as read a couple of months ago, I'm
> so much more productive because I don't feel the need to clear that
> spam counter!

Is it possible to mark the spam as read automatic?

Colin Colehour [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

[put at-character here]Christian Poulsen, You can create a filter to do that.

Click on the link "Create a new Filter", near the search box.

In the HAS THE WORDS box, put "in:spam" without the quotes and then click the NEXT STEP button.

Its going to give you a little warning saying that you shouldn't create a filter that catches everything in a label like in:spam, but you can just hit ok to that.

It will then ask you for an action to be taken, This is where you click on the checkbox for MARK AS READ. Then click the finish button and you should now have the feature that Tony was talking about.

Christian Poulsen [PersonRank 1]

15 years ago #

Thanks for the tip.

Forum home

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!