eBay Phishing scams, eh?
This is a clever one.
The eBay site is redirecting requests to external domains. An attacker can build a querystring that will cause a valid ebay.com domain to redirect to an attacker’s page:
http://cgi4.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MfcISAPICommand=RedirectToDomain&DomainUrl=http://www.attackers-domain.com/malware/
All they need do is obfuscate the URL to hide what is really happening, like so:
That’ll point to http://home.durdle.com. Looks more like an eBay page though, right?
Of course people need to be vigilant about what emails are asking them to do, the one that prompted me to investigate this was asking me to “confirm my account details” so was obviously fake. Well, obvious to me, I know a good number of people who would have seen a valid eBay URL and diligently followed the instructions.
Perhaps eBay need some validation on their RedirectToDomain command, or at the very least they could check for an HTTP referrer, so that it would only work if you were following a link from within an eBay page.
Update: eBay are dumber than a bag of hammers, and completely miss the point. See the comments for updates. Also check the thread I spawned on Dave Farber’s Interesting People mailing list.
On the other side of the pond, the American networks have been creating some fantastic drama and science-fiction. 24 is an obvious standout, we’re four hours into Jack’s new nightmare day and I’m as gripped as ever. It’ll never seem as fresh or as imaginative as the first season when the concept still seemed brand new but it’s still great episodic television. I have good memories of the first series as I caught up with it in one marathon viewing over a bank holiday along with my then housemates. We put on the first disc “just to see what it was like” and then kept feeding the DVD player with discs until we’d had our fill. Great stuff.
Battlestar Galactica is the best science-fiction on television today. Filmed in almost documentary style, even the CGI has a gritty realism; just watch the next time you see a shot of a space battle in it, the camera pans *past* the ships, and then back again - as if the “cameraman” missed the action. It’s small touches like this that really make the show worth watching.
Despite Richard Dean Anderson’s reduced input to the show, StarGate SG-1 has continued to provide great stories balancing the epic story arc that now stretches back to the first season with characters and situations fresh to the latest season. SG-1 is another of those rare SF shows that doesn’t push the reset button at the end of a show: if SG-1 discover a bit of alien technology, you can bet they’ll put that to use in a later episode. If they meet a friendly alien race it’s a fair bet that they’ll turn up in a later episode with some input to the current crisis. Add to that the ongoing political machinations back on Earth and you’ve got a hell of a lot of story to tell. Ben Browder’s character will appear in season nine which will be fun, it’ll be interesting to see if he shares any screen time with Claudi Black when she reprises her SG-1 role from season eight.
The real surprise of the new season of telly has been HUFF, a show I’d heard precisely nothing about. Airing on FX289 in the UK it introduces us to Hank Azaria’s troubled Craig “Huff” Huffstodt a psychiatrist who lacks balance and clarity in his own life, while struggling to help others achieve these goals. His wife, Beth, is played by Paget Brewster who you’ll recognise from her stint in Friends playing Kathy - Joey’s girlfriend with whom Chandler falls in love. I’ve only seen the first two episodes but I’m hooked, primarily because of Hank Azaria’s outstanding performance. This is a man who I’ve previously only known as the voice of Professor Frink (and who knows how many more characters) in The Simpsons. His nuanced performance as Huff is a revelation.
Alias continues to impress and confuse in equal measure! This is a show that never seemed to take off in the UK, so I have to get my fix via BitTorrent download. This is no great hardship as it is broadcast in HDTV on ABC in the US so the quality I get is outstanding - HiDef widescreen with surround sound. Nice! The first few episodes of season four have managed to rearrange everyone’s lives to the extent that if you’d missed seasons two and three, you’d think nothing had changed from season one - everyone is working for Sloane again. Dixon is back in the field, and Sydney continues to flip-flop her affections for her father and of course, for Vaughan. I still miss the character of Sydney’s almost platonic friend Will who seemed to disappear completely in season three. I can understand why removing him makes the writing easier: Sydney no longer has to invent endless cover stories for her travel as she now works with all her friends on the same missions. A bit of writing convenience that I’ll allow them! Now we wait for the inevitable betrayal by Sloane…
Joey started in the UK this week after a frenzied bidding war between Sky, Channel 4 and Five which Five one by paying half a million pounds per episode. They must be praying it doesn’t tank. Judging by the first two episodes it has a reasonable chance of success - with at least one likeable new character in the form of Paulo Costanzo’s Michael - Joey’s genius nephew. You’ll recognise Paulo as the pot-smoking genius from Road Trip. He plays much the same character here (minus the pot, obviously - this is prime time America after all!). By the end of the pilot they’d engineered his moving in to Joey’s apartment, thus setting the scene for a nice “odd-couple” arrangement. Hmmm, Joey living with someone much smarter than him? Well, it worked for 10 years with Chandler…
Smallville kicked off this season by introducing Lois Lane to the cast and putting Lana out of Clark’s reach once again by giving her a new boyfriend: the football coach no less! Clark, fed up of sitting on the sidelines (literally and metaphorically) has decided to join the football team and get in the game: expect awkward moments and lots of “Kiss Me You Fool” moments with him and Lana. Smallville hasn’t grabbed me yet this season, but I’ll continue to watch it just to see how they manage to keep weaving the Superman backstory into the show. Some of the nods and winks last season were inspired - especially the use of the original theme when Clark met with Christopher Reeve’s character. I heard rumour of an episode where they play around with the “Flash” origin story, so that should be fun.
MB2 (”Embie” to her friends) died suddenly on Monday afternoon in the middle of her usual afternoon data transfer, she was 1 year and 2 months old. For over a year Embie had provided sterling service as a backup repository and house media server. As holder of the TiVo archive and maintainer of the MP3 catalogue Embie had made many friends on the Internet. Embie’s easy nature and quick ability to serve content across multiple durdle.com domain names will be missed. Embie is survived by Beaker, Charlotte, MB1 and Hala. It is hoped that her (700Gb of) data can be saved.
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