Things By Mike

Perhaps a lot of folks out there already know about this, but if not this is a warning to anyone who banks with Bank of America. Someone is phishing for bank account information using a site from Sweden called Sand Viken Garden. I received an e-mail about five minutes ago which contains the following text:

“Dear Valued Customer :

As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the Bank Of America Online Banking system. We recently contacted you after noticing an issue on your account.We requested information from you for the following reason:

Our system requires further account verification.

To restore your account, please Sign in to Online Banking.“

When you hover over the link provided in the email you can see in your browser status window that it points to:

hxxp://www.sandvikengarden.s.se/onlinebanking/index.html.

Obviously I’m not going to hyperlink that because I don’t feel like contributing to their cause.

I was just sifting through some of the folders on my hard drive and stumbled onto a silly drawing I’d forgotten about. I used to participate in a little friends forum on Communities.com called “Freaks and Geeks” and we had a friendly drawing challenge where you took a theme the moderator gave you and had to draw your interpretation of it using nothing but Microsoft Paint. This particular drawing was based on the theme “animal chase”. Once the challenge was completed I imported the drawing into Illustrator and just used it’s Live Trace function to smooth out the jagged lines.

In case you hadn’t heard John Chow dot Com, a popular site for those who want to learn how to make money on the internet is having another nifty little contest as a means for his evil plans to rule the Google universe. This time John is giving away a Microsoft Zune. If you’d like to get your hands on the Zune, head over John’s site and read the very simple rules for contest entry.