Saturday, August 21, 2010

Unexplained experiences in Pune

It has been more than a decade but the moment is still fresh in memory. Don't remember the exact time now, but it was sometimes between 1996-1999 during hot months of May-June. One day when going towards Kothi Gate from department (Pune University Computer Science Department) around 2:00pm, when it is quite hot during the day, at the crossroads near the department it seemed as if something touched my hand or my hand touched something, and it felt as if I touched cold ice. Rest of the body except that part of the hand was hot in sun and that part of the hand was quite cold.

Perhaps some kind of invisible thing - could it be convection current? could it be some invisibility experiment at university?

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Phishers targeting Indian Income Tax Payers


Recently I got an email (claiming to be) from refund@incometaxindia.gov.in that went like

Dear Taxpayer,

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of (INR) 13963.00 .

Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it.

A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons.
For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.

To access your tax refund, use the form attached to this email.


Regards,
Department of Revenue,Ministry of Finance,Government of India

It also had an attachment 

Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name=income tax refund request.html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=income tax refund request.html

Size of attachment was 4 lines, 5 words and 26037 bytes, with newlines being CRLF. The content of this html file was a small Javascript  doing a document.write(unescape('.... a large escaped string ....')), and it showed like attached image, except the following missing line at the bottom of the page in the image.

Note: For security reasons, we recommend that you close your browser after you have finished the refund process.

Here are the headers of the mail.

From: "refund@incometaxindia.gov.in" <refund@incometaxindia.gov.in>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Cc:
Subject: Refund income tax department
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:48:07 -0500
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