China is notorious for its hackers, who always try to hack various sites of strategic and financial importance to various countries including Unites States, UK and India.

In recent news the police have shut down a training operation for hackers in central China. The site called Black Hawk Safety in Hubei province in central China openly recruited thousands of members online and trained them with cyber attacks lessons and malicious software.

Police also arrested 3 people suspected of running the site. The site recruited nearly 12000 paid members and collected revenue of $1 million in subscription fees.

China must learn a lesson that in this transition world of internet, these activities will defame them and cut their options in IT and ITES services.

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Google chrome browser is showing upward trend in popularity, according to NetMarketShare.com report. In its January data it shows some very interesting trend

These data is based on their own metrics and cannot deemed as reliable, but in a nutshell it shows that Google chrome is going deeper in the once exclusive territory of IE and Mozilla Firefox

You can read the full report here: Net Market Share Report

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Yesterday I had written a post about an email which pretends to be from Gmail team, which requested information about account details, browsers etc. you can read it here: Gmail Phishing Scam in Circulation Do not Reply

Today I received another email regarding the same, but the style of convincing to reply looks a little official. This is the email which I received:

Gmail is experiencing congestion causing slow network due to unused accounts registerred by most of our Users. Google Team want to remove/eliminate all unused/unwanted accounts.

Gmail also want to know how often you use your Account . Send us your domain login below for verification and for your account not to be shut down unexpectedly.

Account:
Password:
Birth date:
Country:

Warning!!!   Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

Thanks Gmail!

G MAI L BETA

Have you noticed something, there are spelling and grammatical mistakes in the message. (I do not think that Gmail team will hire a 10 grade kid to write and send warning emails on their behalf ) They wanted to know how often I use my Gmail account, what a silly question? They already know how often and from which geographic locations (IPs) I login, which browser, operating system I use and more..

In the previous email, I tried to track the sender’s IP, and it was located at some place in South Africa.

In today’s email I tried to track the return path. Have a look below what I got
Return-Path: <karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com>
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com designates 10.239.193.19 as permitted sender) client-ip=10.239.193.19;Authentication-Results: mr.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com designates 10.239.193.19 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com; dkim=pass header.i=karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com
Received: from mr.google.com ([10.239.193.19])
Sender: karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com
Received: by 10.239.193.19 with SMTP id g19mt77889hbi.207.1264948501790;

It is a little technical jargon, but we are not going to mess with it. The things important for us are the Return-Path (which is karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com)

I just Googled the email id karpoffaffiliates@gmail.com, and look what I found

When you will visit first 2, 3 listing you can easily find that the email belongs to KARPOFF AFFILIATES LLC.

Visit here: http://www.dealmakers.net/ads/ad_det.asp?id=1554 and you can get the whole picture.

So after doing all these research I am still unsure whether these emails are being sent by Gmail these, or some scammers.

But for your own safety, DO NOT REPLY.

Hope you all have found this post useful.

What is your opinion on this, please post in comments.

Do not forget to follow me on Twitter for updates.

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I received a message couple of days before which claimed to be from Gmail accounts department, stating that my account has been automatically chosen for permanent deletion and I must reply with some information like account name, password, date of birth, country for verification. If I fail to so they will delete my account permanently within a week.

Just have a look what I have got.

From: Gmail <account-support@gmeasdcenter.com>
Reply-to:  Gmail <verifyscecences@gmail.com>
To:  accounts@google.com
Date: Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 5:26 AM
Subject            : Your Account

We are shutting down some email accounts and your account was automatically chosen to be deleted. If you are still interested in using our email service please fill in the space below for verification purpose by clicking the reply button. Learn more

Account:
Password:
Birth date:
Country:

Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.

Thank you for using Gmail!

The Gmail Team

GMAIL

Some of my fiends also reported the same issue, in addition to the above information they were also asked to provide:

Please Also Include:

Operating system (e.g. WinXP):
Program and version you use to access Gmail (e.g. Internet Explorer 7 or Outlook 2003):
Your antivirus software (e.g. Norton 2007):
Any extensions, toolbars or plug-ins:

A thought struck in my mind that why would Gmail need my password, if they want to verify my account they could do it by using phone verification or some other method and why would they need the data about my operating system, my browser, my antivirus software and other stuff, when they can easily track it (and they do it for sure ).

So I gave a deeper look to the email and I found that the originating IP of the email was 41.19.212.145, and when I traced back the IP, see what got.

Tracing was done through a proxy which is situated on a server in US. So the map shows, starting from location India to the proxy in US and then to the IP which is being traced.

It was from some unknown location in Africa, now I was wondering that when Gmail shifted their headquarters to Africa and are they recruiting tribals as their operating staff.

So beware and do not reply to such emails and need not to be panic.

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Almost everyone on internet uses various online services like email, social networking sites, online payment processing and more.

Yes Right, so what’s new in it?

Here we are talking about password safety. People chose passwords without giving it much importance. Among popular choices are place of birth, date of birth, or some popular and easy to type phrases and digit combination like qwerty, asdfgh, 123456 etc. despite knowing the fact that there are hackers around who always try to hack user accounts for their malicious intentions.

According to a new research the most popular password for the last decade was “12345”.

Other popular passwords are:

123456
abc123
iloveyou
password
wordpass

Says a new research.

So the key here is to protect your passwords for the safety of your accounts. Some easy steps are:

• Use a mix of upper case, lower case letters and numerals.
  Use special symbols like @, $, &.
  Never disclose your pass word to any one.
  Never save your passwords in excel or word file and name it password, because if there is any spyware residing on your pc, it can transfer the data to other servers.
  Use keyword simulation software which works using mouse, instead of typing with keyboard while logging to different accounts.
  Frequently clear your cookies and temporary internet data.

So always keep your passwords safe and make it impossible to hack.

Do you have any more suggestions, please share with us.

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