Vishing

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Nope, this is not spelling mistake.

Vishing is the criminal practice of using social engineering and Voice over IP (VoIP) to gain access to private personal and financial information from the public for the purpose of financial reward. To know more about it, you may want to read up this Wikipedia article here. (You may also want to refer to some of these examples: [1], [2], [3].)

To be frank, I wasn’t really aware of Vshing until I read APLINK’s article. The closest thing to Vishing I have experienced, is when Headhunters impersonate as a staff from an overseas office asking for phone numbers or email address who are from the same mailing list.

The usual scenario goes like this: Someone will call claiming they are on a business trip or vacation, and they are having some computer problems which prevented them from accessing the company network via VPN. But the matter is important or urgent and they need to know the numbers to call certain people, or to send them an important and updated spreadsheet / presentation via their own private email account in Hotmail or Gmail.

I have developed a way to frustrate these people by asking them to go through a verification process which requires them to provide certain personal information, for e.g. their immediate line managers, their corporate-issued mobile number (for call back verification), the last 4 digits of their employee number and, on a good day we feel particularly charitable to the International Red Cross, their credit card numbers. Usually, by then they either realise they are getting nowhere and hang up in anger, or they realised they are so thoroughly busted they just hang up.

Anyway, the other thing that reminds me of Vishing in Singapore, would be cases of ‘High Court Officials’ – or was it ‘officers from the Commercial Crimes Department [CCD]’ ? – calling one up to say that one’s account is going to be frozen by the government gahmen due to some ongoing criminal investigation. My understanding is that they will then ask for the person to transfer money to a holding account’

Another one would be someone impersonating as officials from even the CPF Board, calling up to advise the victim to transfer their GST Rebates to a certain account number, as it part of the CPF’s services to automatically remit that money to their account.

Frankly, do not trust any form of communications whereby you are unable to verify the source. Even if they give you a call-back number, it is not to be trusted. The best thing to do would be, as APLINK advised, to trust only the number you already know – for e.g. for credit cards, the number you find at the back of your card, or in the case of gahmen departments, the numbers listed on the .gov.sg websites.

In summary, don’t panic and stay calm. Don’t jump the gun and never do what those people tell you right away.

After all, if what those people are saying is true, whatever bad things that is happening to your account cannot be averted. In fact, tell them you will come down personally to whatever department they say they are calling from to meet them and pass them the information. Insist that you want this to be done for good order sake. And if they threatens you, then all the more you should meet them, insisting that you are trying to do your part as a good citizen.

If they refused or gave you excuses that this is unnecessary, just hang up. After all, if they are indeed gahmen officials, why should they be afraid of you going over to meet them, at your own expense and your own inconvenience?

Moral Degenerates on the Internet

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I was going through the feeds on my RSS reader and was speechless after reading the comment quoted here.

“I wonder why the lady slept without locking her door at night? She was renting a room, so she should have been wise to lock the door.

Just curious about such a suspicious circumstance. She was like inviting trouble. No doubt the landlord should not have opened her door, but why she took such a risk to ruin a man and his family?”

It is not wrong to say that the lady was careless and that she had no threat awareness, but the above comment goes even further. It actually puts the blame on the victim for what has been done.

I won’t go further to give examples on just how absurdly wrong the above comment was. Alice has given several examples already. What the hell makes anyone think that for women who has no threat awareness or those who are simply being careless deserved what is coming for them?

Anyway, I would not not quite agree with Alice when she said ‘this exactly shows how the moral of the society has deteriorated’. But I can understand where she is coming from (even when I am no paragon of virtue), after I read the posts from Jean on my RSS reader, and went through some of the the comments and a link to Sammyboy’s forum in one of Jean’s post here.

All I want to say is, being a strong believer of retribution (or poetic justice), my opinion is that the only way people like these can be shown just how wrong they are, is to have some crime or wrong done (or some mishaps happening) to them as a result of their own carelessness. Then, some other person should come around and made a similarly insensitive remark.

I sincerely do hope they are made up of sterner stuff and won’t go about whining like a wimp at hust how insensitive those comments are when it happens to them.


A fine example of retribution (or poetic justice) would be having made prank calls, one gets a series of nuisance calls in return…

Storm in a Teacup – Over Endoh’s Post

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I was rather amused when I got the link to this post. Obviously, the blogger needs to have his final say after failing to force his opinion down the throat of everyone else in the comment section of Endoh’s blog post here.

I find this part of the post the most amusing:

Especially since he keeps contradicting himself with statements like, for example, on one page that says “the taxation of petrol in Singapore was never designed as a measure to counter traffic congestion”, and on another page that says “I do not deny petrol taxation is one of the various methods on top of ERP and higher road-tax charges etc. [to control traffic growth]”.)

Erm… there is actually a contradiction here?!

For example, it is my considered opinion that a 10-cent coin was never designed specifically for the purpose of prying the cover off a tin of Milo. Yet at the same time, I also do not deny it can be used for that purpose, on top of a screwdriver, or a spoon.

Am I being contradictory, when all I was doing was simply making my stand clear? Is the blogger trying very hard to prove to everyone with his example of a ‘contradiction’ that he is challenged in the department of logic?

Anyway, it was within this blogger’s right to comment on Endoh’s post, but if all he wanted to do was to point this out, no one would really object to that!

Unfortunately, the blogger obviously believe strongly enough that his perceived reality is the way the rest of the world is looking at the matter (or perhaps how the rest of the world should look at it). This is alarming because the question here is no longer whether the blogger’s comprehension capabilities is impaired, but also if there’s a more serious and fundamental problem with his mental state – something like that of Adolf Hitler in its infancy – whereby he should seek immediate and professional psychiatric assistance…

I would hope it’s not something that serious, but rather that the blogger had obviously over-estimated his rather limited mental capabilities. Apart from failing to recognise how mistaken he was, the concept of ‘agreeing to disagree’ must have been beyond his capability to grasp. In fact, when confronted with that option, it must have triggered yet another hitherto unknown mental deficiency, which caused the blogger to ‘pitch tent’ in the comment section of Endoh’s blog post for some time trying to force his opinion down the throats of anyone who dares to oppose him!

Nothing insightful or valuable was really offered in that period, though the blogger would dispute that as he repeat the same old shit in an impressive number of ways. On top of that, a blog-less wonder which staunchly defended the blogger has caused me to wonder if that wasn’t a sign of a bout of schizophrenia. * shudders *

Even so, the blogger’s lack in debating skills is far less glaring than his obsession with making people see things in one way – the way he sees it. That’s clearly a mild form of mental sickness.

However, I am a little puzzled why he has finally written this piece, when he has been content with ‘defecating’ on the comment section of Endoh’s blog for the better part of two days. But let me hazard a guess on what drove him over the edge:

The Akismet plugin in Endoh’s WordPress setup got so ‘upset’ with this blogger’s comments that even the bot has marked those comments as spam and deleted them automatically.

And that, would be classic example of a level of idiocy that really takes the cake!

Holland 3 : 0 Shitaly

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There’s no greater news to wake up to than this!

Now all it needs is for Italy Shitaly to ‘keep this up’ . Yes. Keep losing until they crash out of the first round ignominiously – preferably with ZERO (0) points and a large goal deficit. There’s nothing more satisfying than that!

But before that, Fabio Grosso must trip someone in the defending area near the end of the match and a penalty rewarded to the opposing team, whereby the opposing team will score and send Shitaly crashing out. And in the best case scenario, Materazzi must lose his cool and headbutt someone and get himself a red card too.

There will be nothing more deserving than this as a well deserved retribution to the thieves of the World Cup!

An Uneducated View on PDA / Smartphone Reviews (II)

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This is a typical PDA / Smartphone product review found on Cnet.

But before I begin, let me first emphasize that this is not an attack on the quality of Cnet’s review because it has always been my opinion that Cnet’s editors do some of the most balanced and objective, if not the best, technical reviews that can be found on the Internet. Very often I recommend that my friends read them up, and I also read up a Cnet review before making my decision to purchase a particular electronic product – be it a digital camera, PDA, laptop or even a mobile phone.

Take a look at the example of the HTC Touch review given above. As with all Cnet reviews, it gives you an overview of the specifications of the product, the features available, the good and the bad and even showing you the quality of the pictures taken with the built-in camera. I have come across a review of the iPhone which even some of the known gripes and criticisms from those already using a product is mentioned. For e.g., I quote: “CNET users have also reported volume problems, and a few people we called said they heard a slight background hiss.”

Unfortunately, this is where my praises for Cnet’s reviews end, and with all due respect to the Cnet editors, this is no fault of yours.

I am quite sure many of us has bought a product after comparing the features and taking the one with the most features usable for us, and also on performance, but ultimately found the product unwieldy and hardly of use for the purpose we intended it for after purchase. (That is also why I have completely sworn myself off PDA smartphones, with the exception of the Blackberry. The reason was that this is the one product that best suit my uses in the corporate environment, given to me free by the company because I am one of the Blackberry Enterprise Server administrators.)

Anyway, what good is a review telling you how good the sound or the quality of the picture taken is, the range the WIFI built in etc when there are so many similar products out there with comparable features? When our decision making is solely based on comparing features and specifications, is that not the very reason we found ourselves in want – not in need – of an upgrade, or desiring a better phone in the near future? In the end we end up trying to chase the technology and because our current gadget was only the best – a has been – until the next one comes along.

So what is the point I am trying to make here? What I am doing here is presenting my uneducated view here on how a product review can be further improved. For e.g. it might help us if the review tells us how the HTC Touch can integrate with the work of users of a certain profile, and there’s a short video or a presentation featuring a real user showing us what he has done with it etc. And I don’t mean looking for fan boys to sing the praises of a product and try to convince us just why a pile of stinking iDung or the iFart from Steve Job’s ass maybe fragrant.

I mean, don’t we all at times discovered we wanted something because our friends flashes us their gadgets and tell us just what he can do with it and how cool that might be because that’s something we are looking for all along? And wouldn’t that save also help save us a lot of money because this will be one product that will serve our purpose and last us for a long time to come?

I thank Endoh for giving me the inspiration to this article. And to Chaosdingo: ‘this is the article I told you I wanted to write sometime back on WLM. It is finally here.’

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