I am proud of my GMail which has a very sensible Spam Filter. But this time it was Firefox which saved the day for me. Not that I didn’t know it, but it doesn’t hurt to praise Firefox. I received a mail from alert@hdfcbank.com ( HDFC is one of the most established banks of India) with the Subject Line reading:
HDFC BANK ALERT. The mail surely looked like a spam, but was surprisingly in my Inbox. What it had to say is shown in the pic below.

The Link shown here (netbanking.hdfcbank.com) actually redirects to a marcharbel’s org site, which I’m not going to link to.The site has been disable by now, but just tried hitting it (in Firefox) and was pleased to see the results. Here’s what happened.

Hence proved, Firefox rules. Public Service Announcement: Please enable your status bars for your browsers. For any suspicious URLs given in mails, please check the actual URL to which the link provided in the mail is actually pointing it. It appears in the status bar when you have the mouse over the link. Best Security practice: Never reveal financial details like bank account no, User ID, password, PIN no, DOB, personal details in mails. And yes, if you feel any sort of suspicion, it is best to Google for it first. There are scores of websites providing information on such scams and all of them are indexed by Google. Until next time, Surf Safe!

















3 responses so far ↓
1 LiveCrunch // Jan 7, 2008 at 4:36 pm
I bet you are going to like FF3 even more!
2 Gautham // Jan 8, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Hmmm, i receive, Amazon, HSBC and what not such emails. Just preview the link that it’s ask us to open. Almost all the time, you can see it’s fake right there.
And yes sometimes it also helps that you never an account with some of the above mentioned parties
3 Sujoy // Jan 8, 2008 at 9:58 pm
@ Livecrunch:
I am yet to explore FF3,but surely will do tht.
@Gautham,
So true, it so helps not to have an account with all of them.
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