By Graham K. Rogers

Be careful what you click on.

Despite all the warnings and information online about phishing and not clicking on links in emails that may not be what they seem, these still keep arriving. I have a number each week that tell me Apple accounts are closed - please click here - and just had one purporting to be from Netflix: "During a routine check of your account we have failed to validate the billing method we have on record for your account."

As this was paid over the weekend, I was suspicious from the go. Even more so when I saw the email was not the one associated with my Netflix account. On the Mac, I opened the Netflix page in a browser and logged straight into my account, so the message I received was patently false.

Not that I was going to click on the large green button marked, Continue, but holding the cursor over this showed me a site of expacc190 DOT com and I contacted Netflix. After a chat session that confirmed my account was OK, I forwarded the email to their phishing security account at phishing AT netflix.com and looked at the email further.

Although the message appeared to come from Netflix, the site was actually netflix.ssl.com, but those IP numbers reveal a bit more: the message appears to come from Rackspace, a cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas that offers hosting services. We have had phishing from Texas before.

Be careful what you click on - not from Netflix

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life. He can be followed on Twitter (@extensions_th)