Chatty Technicians

If you are a home user and think you have nothing to fear from this type of impersonation, think again-you are actually targeted more often by scammers and hackers alike. This is because many Internet newcomers (newbies) will believe anything someone appearing to be their ISP's tech support personnel tells them. For example, hackers will often send out mass messages to people, or sit in chat rooms and wait for a newbie to come along. They will then set up a fake account or use simple tricks to make it appear as if an AOL employee is chatting with them. What the newbies do not realize is that they are actually talking with a hacker in disguise. So, they willingly hand over everything from credit cards to user names and passwords. See Figure 1 for an example of how a fake request might appear.

As you can see, to a beginner it appears that an AOL Administrator is on the other side of this conversation. However, if you look closely, you will see a blank like after Hckr-name:. To make it appear as though an AOL System Administrator is talking, we added a line of space characters to the beginning of the text to drop the AOL System Administrator: to the next line. Although the original name does appear, it would not be difficult for a hacker to set up an account using a date or company name to disguise the fact the account was simply another username.