Phishing Scams: What Can You Do?

There are a lot of phishing scams out there at the moment.  The reason I decided to post this is because I almost fell for one of the social networking scams.  I was in Facebook the other day and what appeared to be an instant message from a friend popped up.  It said something like "You won't believe what someone's put on their blog about you!! " with a link to what looked like and AOL member page.  Actually I probably would believe what someone put in their blog about me, but this was not the sort of message I get from that friend J.  Stupidly I clicked on the link.  It took a few seconds, but didn't take me to AOL, but brought me to what appeared to be the Facebook logon page.

Hmm..  that's weird I thought, but I trust this friend and was almost ready to start inputting my username and password, but a quick look at the URL showed me it wasn't www.facebook.com but something very similar.

I immediately called my friend and told them to change their password to stop this nuisance messaging.  Sure enough they had been told by several other people that they were also receiving weird messages. 

Although this doesn't appear to be the typical phishing scam where they're asking for personal information, it was still annoying. 

If you want to learn more about Phishing scams and how to protect yourself check out this article:

Recognizing Phishing Scams and Fraudulent / Hoax Email - Microsoft Security.