Phishing...

It was a strange email. Not from a name that I recognised. But it praised this blog, used an obscure link from a two year old blog post, and then used this as the hook to entice me into clicking on a link.

So I checked the actual email address, and yep, the name wasn't the same, plus it was a gmail address, so it was already starting to score quite highly on my 'possible phishing' suspicion counter. The link it so desperately wanted me to click on wasn't quite as ordinary as it appeared, and, like the name at the end of the email, was in a different font size. At this point the suspicion counter was too high and I deleted the email.

Not that long ago, phishing emails tended to routinely use urgency (only 24 hours left, do this now, urgent...) as one of the main ways that they tried to get you to click on the link payload. This email was different, because it was attempting to appeal to my vanity by praising this blog, in the hope that I would then click on the poisoned link payload. Normally this would probably raise it closer in my mind to what is called 'spear-phishing', which is where the email is targeted to an individual, but it didn't seem to be that specific. So my suspicion is that this was just what passes for ordinary phishing nowadays, and is consigned to the same virtual waste bin as all of those emails with names of people I know that say that I must open this link because I will love it, or I must see it, etc., and where again the name and the email address don't match...

I apologise for hijacking this blog post away from the usual music content, but the occasional reminder about

not clicking on links in emails that are even slightly suspicious

is always good, imho. It could save you from all sorts of bad stuff. Just delete suspicious emails.


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