Daily PUMA Column - Commentary by Alessandro Machi

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

WARNING, new Google Base email may be a fraud by those looking to steal your identity or personal information...OR NOT!

(Edit note, it looks like I am in error)

Whenever I am asked to sign in for a "new" or "upgraded" service, If I bother to click on the link at all, I ALWAYS check the URL ADDRESS.

For instance.  I recently received an invite from "Google Base".  But the link URL the email provided looked like this..
http://base.google.com/base/?gsessionid=JMfSM2buUGreiZrqWLbHUw
If the word Google is not immediately after the two forward slashes, I think that means it is a Phishing site looking to steal your information and perhaps do you some kind of identity theft or some other form of harm.

If you want to cut and paste the URL from above you will see that the site looks just like google base, but if you then google "google base", you will find that the word google is indeed directly after the two forward slashes, like this...  
http://www.google.com/base/
I hope you were not "phished" upon by the presumably fake google base email before reading this post.

4 comments:

bobn said...

Actually the given URL:

http://base.google.com/base/?gsessionid=JMfSM2buUGre

is probably OK, unless Google itself has been compromised. The important part is how the the part between the // and the / ends.

In this case, http://base.google.com/

base.google.com is a part of google.com. - because of the period between base and .google.com

more sinister would be:

http://basegoogle.com/

Here the organization is basegoogle.com, which could be *anybody*.

Alessandro Machi said...

Thanks for clearing that up. I still don't want to trust URL's that don't start with the name of the organization.

Anonymous said...

You probably shouldn't visit http://dailypuma.blogspot.com then, only blogspot.com should suffice.

Alessandro Machi said...

Ha ha, good one. However, how come when I googled Google Base I didn't get the base google address as a link?

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