Comments on: 'Phishing' scams luring more users

Security firm MessageLabs says the number of e-mails that use the deceptive tactic has increased from 279 per month to 215,643 over the past six months.

[wes3840]

Norton/Symantec phish?

I have gotten several "Undeliverable" messages in my main email inbox lately, they are all reporting attempts to email various address with a .ru domain, and the sender shows a name in some other Eastern European language with my email address in brackets after that name. This has me thinking I am victim to a remailing trojan of some sort, so I went to the Symantec site (www.norton.com is what I typed in) to look for discussions or forums; while there I clicked on the Updates button and it said I needed several updates to my Norton Systemworks and asked me to input account information. Now my installed Systemworks shows that I have all the latest updates for all components, so I became suspicious that perhaps this was not the "real" Norton site, anyone encountered problems such as this?

Java applet != JavaScript

The article implies that a Java applet and JavaScript are the same thing, but they are completely different. Which is it?

What does this affect?

Nowhere in the story does it say what browsers and what operating systems the phony tool bar can affect. I would like to know if it affects Mozilla or Firefox on Windows? Does it affect any browsers on Macintosh and if so which ones? I mostly use Linux for my web surfing, does it affect any browsers there?