Tag: eBay

New phishing attack poses as PayPal email…

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…and it’s convincing.

I mean, I hate to sound almost impressed by some cruddy email scammer, but as far as “click here to log in and verify your account” phishing attempts go, this one is devoid of broken English, and uses information taken from a recent data breach at eBay to ratchet up the realism by using the target’s actual name. If there is a spectrum of phishing attacks that ranges from “laughable” to “frighteningly realistic,” this one falls much closer to the latter than the former.

The Consumerist blog has a full article that discusses it in greater detail. I strongly suggest you read it. In the example they use, the recipient only used that email address for eBay and PayPal, which added to the realism. It’s a good idea to have separate email addresses used only for online transactions because it helps weed out phishing (if you get a message on your OTHER account that supposedly comes from PayPal, you know it’s fake right away). However, as soon as there is a data breach, your specific-purpose email address can be targeted as well. My guess is that this guy is going to start seeing a ton of spam hitting his eBay/PayPal-only email, and he’ll have to abandon it for a new one.

At its core, this phishing attack was just another “click here to verify” attempt, but by using data from a breach, its success rate is bound to be higher than usual. It’s why you can never stop paying close attention to everything you click on.

Online Scams Epilogue: How to actually make money on the Internet

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So, how do you make money on the Internet?

Perhaps I’ve given the impression that it can’t be done, but that’s not true. However, the answer may not be what you want to hear.

Basically, you have to have something or create something that other people want, and figure out how to deliver it over the Internet.

The easiest way is the most obvious: sell things on eBay. If you have a supply of antiques, collectables or anything else lots of people desire, create an eBay account and go for it. It’s probably not going to be a full-time career or bring you millions of dollars (unless you’re extremely shrewd), but it can be a source of income that doesn’t involve a ton of work on your part.

Other than that, you pretty much have to create something. If you make things by hand, there’s a site called Etsy that allows you to put up a “store” for your wares. Again, it’s probably not going to be a career, but it’s a way to leverage a hobby into extra income.

The blogging world has some success stories. A lot of sites (I Can Has Cheezburger? comes to mind) that have become cultural icons are essentially using a fairly standard blog format. They mostly generate income through advertising revenue (and some of them get book deals later on).

It’s tough to do, but it can be done. Remember; Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were all created by small groups of people with ideas for sites people might like.

So that’s how you make money on the Internet: create content that people want, or sell a service or product. Perhaps there was a time when putting up a page with nothing but paid links to other sites would have worked, but those days are long gone. The Internet just isn’t “neat” enough anymore, in and of itself, for that sort of thing to work. You’ve got to create your own business on the Internet. It’s not easy, and you might fail over and over, but I hear it’s a pretty sweet life when it works.