616: Signed, Sealed, Delivered
I've noticed an increasing number of sites [well... up to three now] adding a special identity theft protection to their websites. It's a good idea, really, because it adds a random factor that phishers can't possibly replicate.
The first one I noticed [naturally] was Neopets, who have changed the login to first prompt for your username, then will show the picture and name of that account's active pet. If it's the correct pet, then you should know that it's safe to enter your password in the prompt below. Of course, if you only have one pet, it doesn't do a damn thing if someone specifically tries to trick you, but as a general rule, phishing tries for broad numbers of people, so it's still a pretty good measure.
Bank of America followed suit with a "choose a picture and input a text phrase" gimmick similar to that, since it doesn't have activities to utilize in quite the same way--I don't think "Is $565.23 your current balance?" would work as well, since that's a lot of the reason I would go to the site. There are thousands of stock images to choose from, and you are allowed to type virtually anything [I assume] as a caption, which similarly makes it impossible for a phisher to guess. [As example, here is mine, which I'm confident sharing because no one has my account ID to go with that.] After seeing this, I thought it'd be nice if Neopets added an additional layer of protection by letting us pick something else besides our active pet, but I'm pretty sure no one will get my password from me.
Now Yahoo! has a similar user-specific watermark, though it's specific to individual computers. I've put up a random Neopets icon just to test [and because I couldn't think of anything else], and though I was originally hesitant to try it, it's pretty cool actually having it now that it's there. It's that feeling of it being customized to my tastes, I suppose, even at that low level of alteration.
Of course, none of these measures work if they're done from fake sites in the first place XD
...hmm :'
I've put off writing a post about something else entirely and have by this point forgotten it again. It may be for the best, because I don't think it was one anyone would have read anyway, or read but with half-hearted interest and skimmed when it got boring. I dunno. I write this stuff for myself--as odd as that sounds, this post amuses me somehow, even if it won't in another five years when I read it and think, "What the fuck was I smoking?" ^^:
Bored artistic disinterest has hit me again. I think the infinitely long cartoon that is "Lucky Luke" has knocked the wind out of my sails--it's taken two sessions of completely filling my hard drive to record it all T_T ...maybe I should get another hard drive? =/
The first one I noticed [naturally] was Neopets, who have changed the login to first prompt for your username, then will show the picture and name of that account's active pet. If it's the correct pet, then you should know that it's safe to enter your password in the prompt below. Of course, if you only have one pet, it doesn't do a damn thing if someone specifically tries to trick you, but as a general rule, phishing tries for broad numbers of people, so it's still a pretty good measure.
Bank of America followed suit with a "choose a picture and input a text phrase" gimmick similar to that, since it doesn't have activities to utilize in quite the same way--I don't think "Is $565.23 your current balance?" would work as well, since that's a lot of the reason I would go to the site. There are thousands of stock images to choose from, and you are allowed to type virtually anything [I assume] as a caption, which similarly makes it impossible for a phisher to guess. [As example, here is mine, which I'm confident sharing because no one has my account ID to go with that.] After seeing this, I thought it'd be nice if Neopets added an additional layer of protection by letting us pick something else besides our active pet, but I'm pretty sure no one will get my password from me.
Now Yahoo! has a similar user-specific watermark, though it's specific to individual computers. I've put up a random Neopets icon just to test [and because I couldn't think of anything else], and though I was originally hesitant to try it, it's pretty cool actually having it now that it's there. It's that feeling of it being customized to my tastes, I suppose, even at that low level of alteration.
Of course, none of these measures work if they're done from fake sites in the first place XD
...hmm :'
I've put off writing a post about something else entirely and have by this point forgotten it again. It may be for the best, because I don't think it was one anyone would have read anyway, or read but with half-hearted interest and skimmed when it got boring. I dunno. I write this stuff for myself--as odd as that sounds, this post amuses me somehow, even if it won't in another five years when I read it and think, "What the fuck was I smoking?" ^^:
Bored artistic disinterest has hit me again. I think the infinitely long cartoon that is "Lucky Luke" has knocked the wind out of my sails--it's taken two sessions of completely filling my hard drive to record it all T_T ...maybe I should get another hard drive? =/