This morning I received the email message below with the subject line: "Account Verification," which stated that my help is needed to resolve an issue with my Hotmail account. When I clicked on the link in the email message, it took me to a fake Windows Live / Hotmail login screen. Please note that the email is a fake and if you click on any of the links, you will be taken to a website looking like the one below.
A Copy of the Malicious Email
Dear Hotmail Customer,
Welcome to Hotmail,
We need your help resolving an issue with your Email account.to give us time to work together on this, we've temporarily limited what you can do with your account until the issue is resolved.
We need a little bit more information about you and your account.
Click here to Update.
Thanks,
The Hotmail Team
Microsoft respects your privacy.to learn more, please read our online Privacy Statement
This email trick is called phishing, and according to webopedia, phishing is "the act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft”.
Fake Windows Live Login Page
above page looks just like the Hotmail / Windows Live login screen. If you enter your email address username and password, the website will steal them.
If you are using Firefox, it will block the web page stating that the page has been reported as a “Web Forgery”. Please see the image below.
Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Opera will also block this page and indicate that the page is a suspected phishing website.
Safari 5 does not block or warn you about the potential dangers of this page, and will therefore, allow persons to visit the page and have their Hotmail.com credentials stolen.
Hotmail will automatically filter or place this email in your Junk filter and if you try to click on any of the links, it will warn you about the dangers of clicking on an unknown link.
The website urlvoid.com, which scans and detects if a website is suspected of phishing, indicates that the website (stilters.com) is a phishing one.