Still Phishing

Haven't seen one of these in quite a while. Normally I wouldn't pay any attention to it but I just bought a new car and financed it through Wachovia. Of course I was suspicious of this email and know better than to fall for something like this but you can never be too careful. I thought it might be interesting to point out some things that tipped me off. Here is the original email:



Of course it sounds very "official" and even cites "Federal Law." Although it is better written than many phishing emails that I've seen, the link itself (obviously "fake") as well as a typo "you account profile" make this email very suspicious. Notice that they ask for your PIN as well as one or more card numbers! To my knowledge, no bank or business will ever ask for this information. When in doubt, you can always contact your bank directly. Just for fun, I decided to click on the link anyway to see where it went... Of course! To a page where you are asked to enter all sorts of personal information, including your account numbers! I brought up the "property" settings of the page and as you can see, the "real" URL has absolutely nothing to do with Wachovia bank!



Curious as to what "www.htech21.com" led to, I entered that address into my browser:



Very interesting... not exactly Wachovia's web site! The lesson here is to always be on guard. If I had been tired, or preoccupied, or maybe late with a car payment and worried about my credit, it's possible I might have fallen prey to a scam like this. It can happen to anyone.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

EOQ Calculations in Excel

Image
Last week in Operations Management we used Excel to calculate the Economic Order Quantity and graph Carrying Costs, Ordering Costs, and Total Costs. The Economic Order Quantity or "EOQ" is the order size that "minimizes" Total Costs. Any more or less and you are spending too much on ordering or too much on keeping inventory. For example, in the Excel spreadsheet below, if you had an Annual Demand of 12000 units, Ordering Costs of $10 per order, and Holding costs of $4 per unit per year, the EOQ would be 245 units and Total Costs would be $980.00: We used the following formula in Excel to calculate EOQ: =SQRT((2*B2*B3)/B4) And the following formula to calculate Total Costs at this point: =$B$6/2*$B$4+$B$2/B6*$B$3 To create the graph, we used the following formulas and simply copied them over a range of 100 to 500 units. Ordering Costs: =$B$2/D2*$B$3 Holding Costs: =D2/2*$B$4 Total Costs: =F2+G2 Looking at this chart, we can clearly see that our order size of 245 is
Read more

Reliability Calculations in Excel

Image
In Operations Management today we used Excel to calculate product reliability. Reliability is defined as "the ability of a product, service, part, or system to perform its intended function under a prescribed set of circumstances" (Stevenson, 2009). In order to calulate reliability over a given length of time we need to use the following formula: P(no failure) = e -t/MTBF where: e = 2.7183 t = Length of service before failure MTBF = Mean Time Between Failures One of the cases we did in class involved an auto detailing company that wanted to calculate the reliability of its vacuum cleaners. Excel provides an "EXP" funtion that we can easily apply here. After entering all data for the problem as shown on the spreadsheet below, we type the formula =EXP(-A5/$B$2) in cell B5 and copy down. Next we plot the distribution for t=0 to the maximum life expectancy of 20 years using a line graph. What we end up with looks like a classic case of "ex
Read more

“How Are We Doing?” Efficiency, Utilization, and Productivity

Image
In business, knowing how we are performing in relation to our competition is vital. Internally we want to know if we are using resources effectively and getting the most out of what we have. Efficiency and Productivity are two calculations that are fundamental to the success of any organization. While the calculations are simple, choosing what measures to use and collecting the necessary data requires a thorough understanding of your industry. To calculate Efficiency you will have to first decide what to use as a base for comparison. Does your company already have a “target” of some kind? Like total units produced? If so then you can compare everything to that. Once you have that, there are a couple of basic formulas that can be used: Efficiency = Actual Output/Effective Capacity X 100% Utilization = Actual Output/Design Capacity X 100% Design Capacity is the maximum output achieved under ideal conditions. Effective Capacity is always less than Design Capacity because of factors
Read more