Anyone else get an email like this?

Sure, it's possible, technically. The likelihood is isn't very high. The other side of this is how many people actually check for a valid SSL certificate before submitting information. Anyway, toodles!

Well, if you're willing to bet your credit card details on this or a similar exploit not occurring in IE or even firefox, that is your choice. However, the responsible advice is to treat any e-mails about account or billing information which have suspicious URLs or e-mail addresses with extreme caution and not to respond to them without confirming directly with whom they report to be.

Any other advice is irresponsible and only encourages the professional phisher.

Matthew

OMG what's the big deal? Just go to the OFFICIAL SL website, confirm your info, and be done with it.

The big deal is:

a) LL's current policy of using a third party for e-mailing out billing/account change requests results in an e-mail will all the classic hallmarks of a phishing attempt which will consistently result in unnecessary forum noise and support calls whilst they continue to do it

b) LL's previous attempt to deal with this overhead by blogging that they were using a third party for account/billing related e-mails and that people should respond to such third party requests, is an open call for phishers to target Secondlife and flies in the face of all internet security advisories

Any responsible internet company ensures that any account/billing related e-mails originate from their own IP domains and addresses and do not contain any URLs. LL needs to take online consumer safety seriously and should do likewise.

Matthew

I'm with Oryx on this one. There was no need for mass panic due to this email.



It is not slang, or "de-funked", it is a real word meaning dead or no longer working. The definition from the Oxford English Dictionary:
A. adj. Having ceased to live; deceased, dead.
b. fig. No longer in existence; having ceased its functions; dead, extinct.

I live in the San Francisco area near LL, and can assure you this is a commonly used word here.

It shouldn't have caused panic but it did. Again, another business practice that may have been better thought out before implementing. And defunct is a word still in fairly common use, but it seemed awkward in this context. They must have let Danny write that message.

Yeah, you're right. (I'm such a pushover!)

Much like the "change your password" email, their strange approach dealing with issues like this results in panic that could easily be avoided by notifying us with a blog post.



Perhaps they should have said an unpaid account will be "pining for the fjords".

It's not a scam, Linden Lab posted about it, I don't remember if it was in the blog or one of those Messages of the Day, but it said something like, please make sure you billing info is up to date, if not you will receive an email asking you to update it

Excellent - a blog post saying "expect an e-mail from a third party asking you to update your account" on the blog posts would be a gift to potential phishers!

Matthew

Not if they specified WHICH third party we should expect to receive the message from.

Here we usually say "Sleeps with the fishes".

Now THAT is a weird fetish!

No - because the phishing pros work on social engineering.

After such a blog post, even if it states which third party, you end up with the entire SL community expecting an e-mail related to their account which isn't from LL.

Of those, a few on receiving an e-mail from anywhere will just assume it is the real one, without checking whether it is the third party mentioned in the blog.

A few will notice it is a different third party but if the e-mail looks convincing enough will assume that LL is using a different third party as well as the one in the blog but haven't got around to blogging about it.

Even if the above only catches a few people out, it is worth it to the phishers.

That is why, ALL the recommended practice is to IGNORE any e-mail relating to account or billings which come from a different e-mail domain or include URLs with different domains to that of the company the e-mail purports to come.

Any instructions to ignore that recommendation is highly irresponsible.

Matthew