FORT EDWARD -- An e-mail purporting to be about flu vaccines could be bad for the health of your bank account.
Washington County Attorney Roger Wickes said he received an e-mail Tuesday morning claiming to be from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
The e-mail directs the recipient to cdc.gov to register for a "personal vaccination profile" so that the government can keep track of people who have received the H1N1 flu vaccine.
The e-mail is a scam.
The link in the e-mail sends a user to a CDC look-alike Web site that extracts sensitive information from a computer, such as passwords to banking sites or credit card information.
Wickes said he discovered the e-mail was fraudulent after checking snopes.com, a Web site that tracks hoaxes and scams.
Known as "phishing," the process differs from online scams in which computer users voluntarily give up their information.
Public Health Director Patty Hunt said her office was aware the fake e-mail was going around.
"This was not a legitimate project," Hunt said. "If people get this e-mail, they should delete it out of their system."
The state Department of Health has alerted county officials. The CDC has also been made aware of the phony e-mail but has yet to release an official statement, officials at the agency said.
"What we are telling people is to beware that H1N1 phishing scams are circulating, they look legitimate and we're asking people to not click on any links or open any attachments because they're apparently malicious pieces of software," said state Department of Health spokeswoman Claire Pospisil.
Any data on flu vaccines being distributed is collected a clinics, Hunt said.
"The data we're collecting is from our clinic sites," Hunt said. "There's nothing happening to our knowledge where the CDC wants people to do in terms of registering online."
Posted in Local on Tuesday, December 1, 2009 8:40 pm
© Copyright 2010, The Post-Star, Lawrence & Cooper Streets Glens Falls, NY | Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
