I just received this from my IT Manager and thought was worth sharing;

A couple things on emails.....

There has been a sharp rise in 'phishing' emails lately.

These are emails that use social engineering techniques to attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

Unfortunately banks and other sites have the bad habit of including links in legitimate emails to allow you to conveniently login by clicking on the link. You should get in the habit of not clicking on these links as it is way too easy for someone to make an email and resulting website look like they are legitimate when in fact they are not. Instead, manually set up bookmarks in your browser for the sites you use and use those instead. Secure sessions in a browser should also start with https:// rather than the normal http://. For secure sites, you can verify the identity of the site by clicking on the lock icon in the browser.

Also, just a reminder, most normal emails are sent as plain text. Because of this no sensitive information should be sent by email.

Good advice. It can also be of help if you immediately forward the phony e to spoof (at) _____. This will alert the security folks at that particular business/bank of the scam and allow them to take some countermeasures.

Also, many folks don't realize this, but you need to be very careful when you use ebay. Just a friendly heads up.

thanks chris you're a swell guy......