Melon Corporate Blog
Commonwealth Securities Remove Active Links From Their Broadcast Emails
This morning I received an email from CommSec - one of Australia’s largest stock broking companies.
All the links in the email to both email addresses and websites were not actively hyperlinked.
CommSec displayed the text of the links but had no href or mailto tags.
CommSec included the following message at the bottom of the email:
"About the links in this email: To protect you from potential security threats, CommSec never uses clickable links in emails. To visit a link, just copy and paste it into your browser."
"CommSec is concerned about your security, and therefore does not provide hyperlinks to any web pages that ask for your login and password details. If you receive an email from us with a hyperlink to any page that asks for your account number and password (including the CommSec home page), please delete the email."
All Australian banks have had a very difficult time with phishing scams.
It is a shame that the criminal elements have forced a backward step in this instance.
I would imagine that many of the recipients of this email would try to click away on the links not having read the small print.
Most likely they would then just give up and move on.
Not a great technique all in all from a response point of view.
It will be interesting to see if this technique used by Commonwealth Securities catches on with any other large organisations.
Blog Categories
Archived Entries
August, 2008July, 2008
June, 2008
May, 2008
April, 2008
March, 2008
February, 2008
January, 2008
November, 2007
October, 2007
September, 2007
Comments - oldest entries appear first, most recent entries at the end.
Leave a comment:
All comments are moderated, name and email fields are mandatory, but only the name will be displayed in the comment, your email address will remain private, and will not be added to any lists. The requirement of the email address is to help ensure that the comments are being submitted by legitimate people.