This is Joe's Fault

Monday, May 08, 2006

Beware of Phblogging

Whew! What a weekend! Firstly, I'd like to warn everyone that this is completely and utterly free for the entire world to view and enjoy and I would never request money from anyone for the, let's face it, endless pleasure you must get from reading it. So for anyone who got taken in by the "New Updates to B3st Weblog!" email that you received yesterday, I apologize and all I can say is be careful about what you click on these days.

I'll let you know what's going on: Early yesterday morning it came to my attention that hackers had gotten control of my blog for malicious purposes. Being in the banking industry I've been aware of the phishing scams for quite a while now. These people are getting more and more clever. They basically take the source code of an online banking site, or PayPal, etc. but change it slightly so that people are fooled into giving out personal identification information, banking numbers, pins, etc. Well, imagine my surprise to find this has started happening with blogs!

I am shocked and outraged that someone would try to use my immensely popular blog for their own nefarious purposes, to try and steal money and generate advertising revenue from gullible idiots such as yourself. Outraged! Well, I found the culprits' site and disabled all of their spam links and attempts at money-gathering, but I thought I'd link to the page anyway in an attempt at educating the public to this sort of thing. They tried to make it sound just like my blog, with the complaining and tedious writing, even going so far as to begin the post with an apology! Those clever bastards!

Anyway, it's very subtle, but see if you would have been able to tell the difference (if you already weren't taken in by this). Here it is, the newest scam on the net: phblogging. And may God have mercy on our souls...