Here's one i made...

Today i've been spending some time writing a new CV; i'm not specifically planning on any jobs to go hunting for (well, there's one i'm going to send it towards once i've proof read it and got the Boss to take a look) but it might be time to go hunting for more... well, lucrative employment. It's been rather weird writing a CV after a decade of not needing one and i've been putting it off for a few weeks because of that. i'm finding myself wondering what exactly i need to include, how far back in my employment history to go and so forth. The education history was amusingly brief, four GCSE C or B grades, one for a subject that doesn't exist in the modern curriculum ("Computing", back in the olde days when they taught BASIC programming in schools) and all about as unrepresentative of myself or my current skills as it's possible to get! And i'll be honest, i've had to either look up or pretty much guess a few dates because i can't remember that far back any more...!

i've decided that it's time that my build server was rebuilt as well. i'm never keen on rebuilding computers (at least, not the ones i use personally) because it always takes me an age to "settle in" afterwards; this machine was rebuilt recently and i've still not finished straightening the start menu out and so on...

Phishing season

So i was checking my emails earlier and in my spam box was a reasonably well done forgery. It purported to be from PayPal and stated that a £100 transfer of funds from my account had been cleared for a subscription to a website called Play And Connect... that was something of a surprise since i've vever heard of the bunnies i'd apparently given a ton to and only ever had that much money in my PayPal account twice and neither was this year!

So despite it already being filed as junk, i did some digging around; Play And Connect haven't got a site up right now but there's a note saying they've nothing to do with the emails, that meant a little digging around through the email itself to see where the "trick" was. The sneakiness laid within the "cancel" link, the text version pointed to PayPal.com but the actual link read PayPal.co-uk.***.pl (i've not posted the full domain, but it was only three characters long) followed by a legitimate-looking command string. Presumably the less tech savvy readers would either not look at the real link or if they did merely see the PayPal at the start of the link and miss the .pl domain.

One little twist is that the reply address points to a parked domain, PayPals.co.uk (note the plural) and i assume that's because if they'd forged a straight PayPal address it would've been picked up by the spam scanners far more quickly.