14 January 2008

phishing regions bank

heres a phishing email we received this morning. its directed against a bank that has some local branches - regions. so we thought we should include it in our collection.

regions used to be called security 1st national bank. it was a locally owned bank although it was before our time we've always been told that a lumberman named hardner from urania in lasalle parish founded security bank as it was called for short. whether that is 100% accurate or not doesnt matter now because a couple of years ago the stockholders of security, just like the boltons's with rapides bank sold out their depositors when they merged with the out of state regions.

in the phishing biz we have to give this attempt a poor rating. although as everyone knows we're hardly knowledgeable in the proper use of english grammar and punctuation so if even we can find grammatical mistakes in the text of the email - it must be poor. also poor grammar and punctuation in corporate emails is one of the clues you're supposed to be on the look out for in a phishing attack.

assuming the intended victim doesnt bother to look that closely at the grammar and punctuation of the email one of the most glaring clues that this is a phishing email is when you hover your mouse over the clickable hyperlink all phishing emails contain.

click pictures to enlarge
when you hover your mouse over the blue hyper-link, whilst looking at your status bar you can easily see that the link doesnt look like its an authentic regions url.

close up of status bar