Playing games with phishers

I just received another phishing attempt in an email that purports to be from Paypal. I forwarded the email, but, this time I was a bit bored so I decided to have a bit of fun with phishers.

Email address: EatShit@die
Password: eatshitanddie
Name: Yousef R Screwed
Address: 24 Sussex, Ottawa

Believe it or not they accepted the above without verifying that @die is not a valid domain. I decided to have fun with the information that they asked for. I had a lot of fun filling in bogus information. I really hope they try to use the information and see how screwed over they will be afterwards. For those of you who are not Canadian the address is the residence of the Prime minister.

The system came back and prompted me for a valid address so I used EatShit@die.com and it accepted.

Spam summary

Here is a summary of my mail that I have received. I have made a small change. Rather than showing week by week I will show month by month. It has gotten a bit better as the large scale spammers are slowly being taken offline.

Time Period	Legit email	Phishing attempts	Other Spam	% Legit email
June	133	10	264	32.7
July	128	6	158	43.8
August	148	8	126	52.5
September	144	4	87	61.3
October	141	6	97	57.8
November	169	9	105	59.7
December	8	0	2	80.0

Mandriva 2006

I finally got the download of the three ISO images for the latest Mandriva and burned onto CDs. I then proceeded to back up my main machine. It took about 30 minutes as I have a lot of photos scanned in. Eventually I may move them to the second hard drive and clean up my home directory.

After the backup I inserted the boot CD and did a restart. The installation process has not changed too much. I picked out all of the individual packages like before. A few notes ->

• GTK-Gnutella is now a package that you can install.
• CLAM AV is installable. This is nice as we still have two kids using windows and I can scan the shared folder for viruses.
• In deselected Scribus, but, the support library still loaded. Small point that does not affect installation.
• CDs, USB hard drives, USB memory sticks, floppies now show in 'Devices' rather than each one cluttering up your desktop.
  

From the point of boot up, selecting packages, installing packages and rebooting took about 45 minutes. It then booted up and I logged in without a problem. KDE 3.4 has a few changes, but, the basics are still the same.

Jane was installed in the same amount of time. The only difference is that she wanted all of the games installed.

Update:
I installed Mandriva 2006 on my daughters machine. Again no hitch, three different computers without any problems at all. She just loves it and thinks that the new backgrounds are totally cool.

I did a scan on the shared drive using CLAM-AV and it found five nasty little critters and trashed them. Jane and I didn't notice them as they were windows based and didn't affect our Linux boxes, but, it is nice to know that the new tool worked.