Friday, January 29, 2010

Google Verification Phishing Scam

Hi all,

Today I received a funny email about google account verification, that it claims to come "allegedly" from the GMAIL TEAM. What crap? Look below:



So the attacker really thinks that we are dumb enough to believe that? If you get such an email report it as phishing. Look at the header information in the enlarged pic below. You will judge for yourself. :)

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Privacy: Where would it stand ahead?

We have been hearing so much about privacy and privacy concerns. We thought we owned the right to privacy. Didn't we? Not anymore, right? Things are changing. The business seems to have taken the right to our privacy whether we want it or not. Where are we going with it? How do you think this would effect our lives in future? Here, I would like to share my own opinion and to listen to yours. I would like to mention that this is just my personal opinion and does not claim to anything.

Google, and I believe many others, may be not to that same extent, seem to know a lot about us. What you searched for, the medical history, the love affair(s), the not-so-romantic letters to the ex, where you live, and much more. Before IT security became so technologically revolutionized and publicly available, we didn't care much about privacy. We took it as a by-default owned commodity. May be we heard something about Bill Clinton. But he is famous. Some of us thought, "Oh well, being a citizen I should have the right to know what are the morally-(un)justifiable things our President is related with".

Initially may be only NSA knew about the common people. Now the (in)security parameter has shifted to include Google, Facebook, etc. knowing (storing) much about us. As technology evolves further, I believe, privacy will be a much bigger concern and information about us would be much easily publicly available than before. However, how much of an impact would that have on our lives? One might think, well may be not much if you are Mr. XYZ whom only a handful of people know or even if you are the prom king and the entire school knows you. But what if you ran a business with thousands of employees looking up to you. Privacy is dear to everyone and should be, to the very least, of equal importance with respect to anyone, no matter how (in)sensitive the information may seem towards exposure.

Privacy is a delicate issue. A not-so-popular guy would be more helpless and might be way more devastated by his secret been revealed than the CTO of a big company, even though the reciprocal may usually be perceived to be true. The intensity of the concerned issue and the approach towards it matters. Then why is our own perspective towards privacy changing? Even though we complain about our privacy being handled in a "regularly-monitored and easily-stored" manner, we still stand head-bowed in front of the technology as it evolves.

It would not be favorable if we'd adapt, against our will, to the changing technology. Even if we did, we might be forced to throw away our then-critical concerns, though at a large cost of having new concerns corresponding to the now-new technology.