Fonts, Phishing, and the Case issue

 

There was an interesting post by Saikiran Kannan, a journalist and an avid twitter user, about a mail received, either by him or someone else, that purported to be from Microsoft.com urging the receiver of the mail to update his/her password. There was a link in the body of the mail ostensibly for the receiver of the mail to click the link. At first glance, nay even after a slightly detailed look at the sender, it was not obvious that the mail was from a phishing site.

 

The sender of the mail was <noreply@rnicrosoft.com>. What would you do in this situation? It does need an eagle's eye to distinguish between microsoft.com (genuine) and rnicrosoft.com (spammer). Now if you haven't spotted the difference yet, let me write them down in upper case here. The genuine mail id would have been <NOREPLY@MICROSOFT.COM>, whereas the email was from <NOREPLY@RNICROSOFT.COM>. As seen in lower case, the difference is very minute and will generally escape most receivers of this phishing mail. I wonder how many people were duped and lost their money or data through this phishing scam! I just googled regarding this and there were some cautionary posts. One here Youtube caution. 

The cautionary post by a LinkedIn user is a bit tech heavy. Here it is LinkedIn caution.

The other thought that came to my mind was would choice of fonts in various websites help prevent this type of phishing mails. I am writing the email ids with various fonts here for you to check.

rnicrosoft.com - Arial

rnicrosoft.com - Courier

rnicrosoft.com - Georgia

rnicrosoft.com - Helvetica

rnicrosoft.com - Times

rnicrosoft.com -  Trebuchet

rnicrosoft.com -  Verdana

The Courier font is the best in distinguishing between rn and m. 

As a side note, whenever I have to write down my mail id by pen on paper, I always use UPPER CASE letters to ensure that the confusion with letters, compounded by our handwriting, does not bounce the email from the sender back to him. My recommendation to you would be to exercise caution when you receive emails like this. Check the sender mail id thoroughly, but even if you feel all is well, open another tab and go to the relevant website and carry out the changes that you want. This is especially with emails from various banks where you have an account.

Take care and wish you all a VERY HAPPY DEEPAWALI!