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I got this phishing attach in my inbox.  You know, one of those that look like they are from paypal or someone, but they really aren’t.  They give you links that they ask you to click on, except that the links don’t go to paypal’s server, they go to some other site that looks like paypal and tricks you into providing your login credentials.  None of this is new.

What is new is how they are providing the address in the link.  They provided the IP address in hex.  So if I were to represent the address to my server, it would be: http://0xcf.0×2d.0×41.0×24/

I thought this was very interesting, so I tried it in Firefox and Opera on my mac, and neither were tricked.  Both browser’s didn’t convert the hex to the real IP address, so it didn’t work.   But it makes me wonder if there are browsers out there that might be tricked by such IP address encoding.

I must be a nerd because web site security worries keeps me awake at night. Tonight I was worried about particular web site designs that might discourage users from logging out and I was curious about how many users were actually logging out.
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GPG is a way to digitally sign email messages so that other people can know that they came from you. It can also be used to encrypt messages. Getting GPG to work is easy if you know the right way to do it, or difficult if you don’t. Here are some steps for the Mac user to get started with GPG: (continue reading…)