The other day I got a call from my wife saying Microsoft had called her. They told her they had picked up that our home PC had been hacked. They asked her to go to a website and enter a security code so they could secure the PC.

Fortunately, she was a bit suspicious and asked them to call back when I was home. She then called me to ask me what this was about. A bit of research on the web quickly told me this was a scam. To verify this I called up our friends at Microsoft to see what their take was on this. Their legal department confirmed this was a common Phishing method. When they called back she took their details and said I would call them back. When I called back the Auckland number they supplied I got a voicemail asking for my details. I left it at that and have heard nothing since.

Wikipedia defines Phishing as “the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication”. We have become used to seeing these attempts via email and spam filters have become very good at filtering these out. It seems now however the bad guys are resorting to using the phone. Below are some links to articles on Phishing and how to recognize and avoid identity theft.

http://www.microsoft.com/hk/athome/security/email/phishing_with_phones.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/nz/digitallife/security/how_to_recognise_a_phishing_scam_e-mail.mspx