Bogus e-mails purporting to be from Apple have been spotted in the wild. They feature a subject line of “Important : Billing Problem” and an outdated .Mac graphic (if you’ve been following the Mac news, you know that .Mac is becoming MobileMe this month). The messages ask you to update your payment information so your service is not interrupted. The link in the e-mail message takes you to a well-crafted copy of an Apple Store page where you can enter your credit card information, which will be promptly sent on to organized crime minions who will use that number as much as possible.
Remember, you can check the URL behind any link in an e-mail message by hovering your cursor over the link, and waiting for a tooltip to pop up showing the URL. Also, if you click such a link, you can tell that it’s not Apple’s web site; just look at the first letters of the link (following www): in this case, it’s a hacked server that has a /media/www.apple.com/us/ path in it leading to the evil page. In these messages, clicking on the graphic takes you to an actual .Mac page (the Learning Center), perhaps to suggest that if that link is real then the payment information link is real as well.
Remember that Intego Personal Antispam can protect you from phishing e-mails by spotting when displayed URLs are different from the links behind them. But always check the URL in your browser when you click any link expecting to provide credit card information, just to be sure, and look for a padlock in your browser window showing that it is a secure page; hackers can’t spoof the padlock icon.
