Tag Archives: Spam

Phishing attempts to get your wordpress.org password

Published Mar 27, 2012 | In WordPress

Recently, I received an email, claiming to be from WordPress.org, notifying that one of my Plugins have been taken down. It also provided a link where I was supposed to check the status of my Plugin. Clicking on this link took me to a website which looked like wordpress.org and was asking for my username and password.

Even though it looked like a WordPress.org website, the url was different. I posted about it the wp-hackers mailing list and got the confirmation that is a phishing attempt to get your WordPress.org username and password.

If you get an email like below, be careful and don’t click the link or enter your username and password.

wordpress.org-phishing-attempt-email

In addition follow the following steps to make sure you don’t compromise your account.

  • Check the sending email address. It will always have a wordpress.org email address
  • Check if the link text and the actual link are different.
  • Make sure that the url of the page where you enter your password is always wordpress.org

You can also find more information about it from this forum thread.

WordPress.org has also sent the following email to all the Plugin developers regarding this issue.

wordpress.org-email-png

Be vigilant and stay safe.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Kill that comment spam

Published Jan 22, 2006 | In WordPress

Off late my blog has been receiving lot of comment spam. Though most of them are caught by WordPress itself I still needed to manually delete them. I planned to install Captcha to overcome it but then dropped the plan since it might cause accessibility problems and even W3C doesn’t recommend it (and me being a guy who believes that a webpage should be accessible for all :)).

Luckily Akismet came to my rescue. Akismet is the brainchild of Matt Mullenweg, the maker of WordPress. It’s a wonderful spam killer and integrates well with WordPress and other bloging platforms too. Every comment left in the blog is sent to a web service filter which filters out the spam comments and the success rate is nearly 100%.

All you need to use it in your blog is just to enable it and enter the API key which you can get by registering with WordPress.com. And once you enable it you never have to worry about spam again.

It comes as a plugin with the default installation of WordPress, but I don’t know how I missed it all these days. You can also download it from Akismet.

So, one more reason for me to love WordPress.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Another spam email

Published Nov 16, 2005 | In Random/Personal

Here is another interesting funny spam which has escaped Gmail’s spam filters and found it’s way to my inbox.

This one claims to be from eBay and is structured in the same way as an legitimate email. Even I was about to click the Respond button. But then something striked me. All the emails that I have received were only from eBay.co.in and not from eBay.com. And so I hovered my mouse over the link and found that it is getting redirected to some other server and not eBay. So as usual I clicked ‘Report Spam’

So the lesson learned. If you need some laugh and have some time to spend, then go to your spam/bulk folder and read those emails. But one word of caution don’t reply to them or click any of those links, they may track you and may find that your email is active.

Happy Spaming….;-)

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

A funny spam mail

Published Nov 2, 2005 | In Random/Personal

Some days ago Jeremy was talking about a funny spam email that has escaped Gmail’s spam filter. And today even I got one such funny spam mail.

Just look at the screen shot.

The funny part is that the email shows my email address in the senders address and also in the subject line. This one was delivered to my inbox ( not in spam). And added to that when I clicked more options, Gmail doesn’t show that it was mailed from some other domain (which means that it was indeed sent from a Gmail address itself)

I am not sure whether I should report this as spam to Gmail. My reason for my fear is that I am not sure whether Gmail will consider my email address itself as spam or not when I report this mail. More over I am not sure yet whether some one else has received this mail with my email address in the from email address.

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , | 12 Comments