Phishing

Phishing is a specialized form of email that is an attempt to get you to reveal sensitive information about your account, such as your password or credit card numbers. Typical targets are PayPal and various banks across the country. See what Wikipedia (offsite link) has to say about phishing and the dangers of falling for it.

Basically, the way this attack works is the attacker sends you an email that says your account has a problem. You're told to login to fix the problem and there is a link there to login to the website. The problem is that the link looks legitimate, but it is really going to a copy of the legitimate website, hosted on some hacked web server. When you try to log in to that copy, it says something like "All issues with your account have been resolved" or similar. The login page stored a copy of your name/password onto the server for the hackers to use as part of an identity theft. Please! Be ever vigilant and on guard against these fraudulent requests for your personal information!

Ivenue's email system uses a virus scanner that detects various phishing emails. It is not going to block everything, but it catches quite a bit of the phishing emails that attempt to get sent to you. To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, as of mid 2007, the virus scanner detects and blocks more phishing emails than virus emails.