January 02, 2008

Moron phishing

One of the most stupidly illiterate attempts at phishing I have yet seen arrived on servers at the University of Edinburgh with the logo at right (served from Abbey National's server at http://abbeynational.co.uk) and text reading thus:

Document sans nom

Customer Service: New Security Standard

Dear Abbey member:

Abbey Bank has the last days updated all user account with better security
to avoid unwanted access and to reduce the instance fraud to keep our
users information secure, Some user accounts lost there information while
new security update was complete, we are realy sorry about this problem.

Can you take 5-10 minutes of your time to make sure your account
information is correct so we can continue our service for you.

Press the link below to update your personal Abbey account

The grammatically clueless sneak thief who wrote this attempt at getting gullible people to cough up their bank account details manages to commit plangent errors at a rate of more than one every five words. I hope no one was dumb enough to click on his link. The visible text said https://myonlineaccounts2.abbeynational.co.uk, but the link actually goes to a site at http://www.ifrance.com/update-bank.

Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at January 2, 2008 05:57 PM