Hello and welcome to the Friday, May 15th,

2006 edition of the Sands Inlet of Storms, Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, recording day from San Diego, California.

And this episode is brought you by the sands.edu graduate certificate program in penetration testing and ethical hacking.

Well, today we have actually two diaries to talk about.

The first one comes again from one of our undergraduate interns.

Joshua Nicholson is writing about how to essentially inspect a website to see if it may be fraudulent.

These are often these fairly cheap consumer goods websites that offer various items at a real good price,

but don't really look quite legit in part because of

the design and the way the sites are created.

So it's always a little bit difficult to figure out if they actually offer a valid product

or if they're really just interested in scamming you.

Well, in this particular case, Joshua offers a couple of hints that point to scam sites,

like, for example, where product images were stolen from eBay listings and the like,

and also tends to have as the ultimate proof.

Joshua actually went ahead and got a specific credit card number with a very small limit

of $5 and placed an order.

And in some of these cases, in some of these websites, well, the card was immediately charged

multiple times from multiple vendors for various amounts that were not necessarily related and anything

close to the cost of the item advertised on this site. So real good work and I think that's

useful kind of sort of types of quick sanity checks on a website to figure out if it may be legitimate or not.

Now, going all the way and actually trying to order something using some credit card number,

...