a toe in the water
Yeah, always talking about it because always getting examples to share.
Another picture to help avoid possibly painful mistakes.
This is my Inbox with only one message displayed.
See the mouse (the pointing index finger) is floating over the first column, the Sender. And beneath the finger is a black rectangular window with white text.
When the finger floats over the Sender that black window pops open and shows the email address the message is supposedly from. It is very obviously NOT the Apple App Store. Mark this message as SPAM and delete without opening!
How many times will you be fooled? Take the test and learn not to be.
Phishing is very common. I’ve written a number of posts cautioning readers and providing examples.
Today I came across something even better! An online phishing test hosted by Google. It presents you with messages and asks whether they are “real” or phishing.
It’s a test… so no messages are really real. But the messages do give you the opportunity to learn if you’d fall victim to phishing. And to learn how to avoid being a victim. Whether the message is phishing or not is explained and illustrated after you judge the message’s authenticity.
Fun. Try it.
Give yourself a Merry Christmas, don’t get phished.
I have posted about phishing before. Hopefully some of what I’ve posted or others have posted has been useful to you. I’m posting again because I got another phishing email just recently that, when I saw it in my Inbox, made me worry for a few moments. That’s because my Inbox shows the subject and the first words of the body of the email. So, what I saw in my Inbox was, “Update on Your Yahoo Account the password for your Yahoo account was recently changed”!
Immediate concern. I did not recently change my Yahoo password. And the sender column of my Inbox does not show the email address. It shows the sender name, in this case “Yahoo”. Have I been hacked? Fortunately, no. If I was in a rush and not paying attention though I might have given up my Yahoo credentials out of panic. So I’m posting again to remind myself, and anyone reading this, DON’T rush when you get an email about your accounts. Take the time to look them over and be certain of what you’ve gotten.
In this case the Inbox view said the email was from Yahoo. As soon as I opened the message it was clearly NOT from Yahoo.
From there, it’s all the usual stuff to know it’s fake. Hover over the link to go fix the “problem” and see the link doesn’t go to a Yahoo.com website.
Then last, I clicked on the link so you could see the webpage it goes to. And you see even though it tries to look like a Yahoo page it clearly is not a Yahoo site.
Please, don’t get hooked. There’s not enough info in the Inbox view to know whether this is something to worry about or not. Once the email is opened there’s two different opportunities to see it isn’t a Yahoo! message.
Stay web safe and have a Merry Christmas.
Illustrations to help you avoid the scam.
Another example of a scam email. It copies PayPal’s look to a T. The apparent email address service@intl.paypal.com is not the email address! The actual email address begins after the “<“. It is an indecipherable address and once you spot the “@” sign you see it isn’t @paypal.com. This isn’t a PayPal email.
Don’t click the button in the email that says “Log in Now”. It will go to a website that looks like PayPal but it’s not. If you enter your PayPal credentials to login then your PayPal account has just been compromised. Don’t do it.
Never seen this before.
I am unemployed due to COVID-19. Probably something that’s happened to many of you. I’ve also been searching for work continuously, continuously, since loosing my director of IT role. I have not gotten an offer on anything equivalent and have had periods of unemployment where I didn’t get responses for anything I applied to. The low point was when I was so desperate I applied for an hourly position at Dunkin Donuts and they didn’t call me back! I have gotten help desk roles and that position is what recently ended due to coronavirus.
Since I have been continuously searching for employment for years I’ve got accounts on all the major job boards, CareerBuilder, Monster, Beyond, Indeed, and many minor and regional ones too. And of course I use LinkedIn. My profile is here, Alan Boba. Message me if you need someone to manage your technology.
Recently I was very disappointed by the response I got back from an application, “Thank you but we’re not interested in you”. The position was very local to me which would have been great. And the IT Manager job description was one I would have written if asked to write one that was an exact match for my skills. I was really hopeful when I sent the application and very very disappointed when the rejection came. Not even a phone screen.
Next position I applied for on CareerBuilder I was presented with a message as soon as I completed the application, “would you like to instantly apply to these 26 matching jobs?” Typically I review job title and description, check the location and do some other review before applying for a position. This time I just hit “apply”. Right away CareerBuilder came back with a similar “instant apply” message and again I clicked “apply”. This kept happening. I kept clicking. I figured to be clicking until “matching jobs” ran out. They never did. I stopped clicking after instant applying to about 500 or so “matching jobs”.
Wouldn’t you know… next day I was getting invitations to online interviews. I was skeptical and cautious. The biggest and most immediate red flag was that all the “interviews” were with people using @aol.com and @gmail.com email addresses. No business emails. But hey, I didn’t have any real offers to reply to and who knows, maybe I’m just too suspicious and one of these was real.
One of them even said they were part of an agribusiness that was started in Australia and expanding in USA. The business is real and it even has two locations in the western US that were correctly identified in the chats.
I received a check by FedEx, almost $4,000! Ostensibly to buy equipment I would need for my office. A cashiers check though, not a check drawn from a business account. The letter that came with it is on plain paper, not office stationery. It doesn’t say what I should buy and doesn’t have a business name or address. Plus I am again directed to communicate with a non-business email account, @aol.com.
I’ve tried to validate the check’s bank routing number and two of the three routing number websites I’ve found recognize the routing number. I’ve also scanned the check front and back. No watermarks show up in either scan. And the check doesn’t have a stamp on it’s face with “valid for xxx days”. A stamp I’ve seen on every cashier’s and corporate check I ever recall handling.
For now I’m still thinking this is a scam. But I’ll play along because I’ve got the time and I’m unemployed. And who knows, maybe I am just too suspicious.
In case you’re curious and want to see what I’ve received so far, take a look at the letter and check that came in the FedEx package. It does cost money to send via FedEx. So unless a business’ FedEx account has been hijacked the scammers have spent some money to send me the check.
There’s more than one way to hook a fish.
Lets say you’ve become comfortable in your ability to recognize phishing email. You’re able to spot the strange “From” address hidden behind the reassuring “Billing Department” or “Customer Service” label that’s been applied. And even if that looks like it might be legit you know how to hover over links in the email and recognize something that says it came from Amazon should have amazon.com/ as the last part of the web address that comes before that very first single forward slash, “/”.
A business web address should always be https://businessname.com/maybemore or https://www.businessname.com/maybemore or https://businessname.org/maybemore and so on. The critical part of the address that tells you where the link will take you is between the paired // and the very first single /.
What do you do when everything looks legit? The “From:” doesn’t look strange, the subject isn’t alarming.
The message itself doesn’t try and make you panic. You can see the full email address and it looks legit. There’s no business website listed in the message but the part of the email address after the @ looks legit. And if you put the part after the @ into your web browser it does go to a legit website, in this case “equitybrands.com”.
Stop right now! There’s no contact info provided in the message. No corporate website identified. No contact phone or email provided. And there’s no info what this is about. Did you buy something and there’s a payment issue, forget to return something, detail about a pending refund…? There’s just nothing except a big blue “View File” button.
In case you can’t resist taking a peek at the “Payment doc.excel” file I did it for you.
It isn’t a regular Excel file because the last part of the file name would be .xls or .xlsx. Sorry but you do need to know that. Ignoring all this I clicked the “View File” button. It got me to the screen below.
If you haven’t got suspicious yet you should turn and run now.
There’s no identifying information for the company.
Why are you being asked for your email? It came to your email. Why is it asking for that now?
What password do you need to enter? Since your email is asked for it seems like a reasonable password would be your email password. Don’t!! Your email password is to get into YOUR email. Nobody else needs that.
Then there’s a conflicting statement at the bottom of this web page. See just below the “Submit” button? It says “Never submit passwords through Google Forms.” That’s because this phishing message is bringing you to a Google Form to collect your email and password. The criminal can’t prevent Google from showing you that warning on a Google Form but they’re hoping you won’t see it or will ignore it.
In summary, even if everything looks legit, if you’re asked to enter your email and password somewhere and you got there by clicking a link in an email DON’T DO IT!
Email and password are for you to get into your accounts. Don’t give them up at a website you got to by an email link.
Always go to the website your usual way and login. Then check your account to see if anything is needed.
If it isn’t a website you remember having an account at do not, do not, do not provide credentials to login. Call the business and ask what’s up!
A guide to spotting email that is meant to deceive you.
Recently I received a number of phishing emails and shared some with family and friends so they could see examples and hopefully avoid any they might get.
After doing that I decided it would be good to share here too. And I went a bit further and made some (admittedly crude) videos to spotlight some of the indicators that an email is phishing.
The videos are posted on YouTube and I’ve embedded them here.
These were my first attempts at creating videos with effects and titles. Please try not to be critical of the production quality and instead focus on the information provided. You’ll find it useful if you do.
For those of you who might look and say, “They’re too tiny. I can’t see anything.”, after starting the video click in the lower right hand corner of the video window. It will enlarge the video.
This one was meant to get the victim to open an attachment. I may make a post and video of what happens if the attachment is opened. For the time being know that the video has tips to help identify it as phishing so we know better than to try and open the attachment.
This one claims there’s a problem with your Apple ID and has links that connect with a counterfeit Apple website. If you were to click the links and complete the forms you’d be giving away your Apple ID login information. Again there’s titles and effects to help identify the tells that make it apparent this isn’t from Apple.
Security. Human factors are always important.
I hold a CISSP certification. Information security is something I’ve found intriguing since I first started my technology career. One of the first user trainings I developed was around the time of the “I love you” malware that struck via a deceptive email attachment. And to this day email continues to be a vector for compromising systems. Or actually I should say, email account holders continue to be a vector for attacking systems.
My office at the time of “I love you” wasn’t struck by it but we would have been except for our mail system. Everyone in the business, about 160 people at the time, had gotten the system security training. And a special alert had gone out after the training warning of “I love you”. By and large the people in the company were well educated professionals with uncommonly high expectations around privacy and confidentiality. Our work was providing counseling and permanency for youth and families involved with various states’ child and family services departments.
What I mean to say is the staff of the organization all understood and practiced privacy and confidentiality and so were an interested and engaged audience for the security training.
With the above as background, this is the story of “I love you” in my office.
One day the Executive Director’s Administrative Assistant called me and said, “Alan, I think I’ve done something I shouldn’t have.” She explained she had gotten an email from the building’s manager with an “I love you” attachment. The man was someone she dealt with often and was on good terms with. She was married and was a bit upset by getting an email with such a bold attachment. She was also intrigued wondering why he would send it to her and what message might be inside.
She didn’t delete the email immediately but kept it and wondered what message it might contain. Finally she opened the email and attempted to open the attachment. Nothing happened.
Our mail system was Lotus Notes client and server. The malware relied on Visual Basic Scripting in Microsoft Outlook and so was unable to propagate in our environment.
This is a case where a knowledgeable person with a commitment to privacy and confidentiality and who had gotten security training as well as read the follow up warnings about “I love you” nearly caused a security incident because of curiosity! The only reason there was no incident was because of a technical feature of our environment.
She realized something was wrong when there was no message to see. And then she relied on her training, called me, and confessed to maybe doing something wrong.
This is a lesson that’s stayed with me. You can have good people and good training but good technical measures are still needed to back them up. People will occasionally do things they suspect might not be in their best interest because of some other overriding impulse, like curiosity.
And this brings me to something else, earning CPE (Continuing Professional Education) credits to keep my CISSP current. I generally enjoy the briefings and learn many interesting things while earning CPEs. However I do struggle sometimes because it is difficult at times to find CPE courses that are not too strongly vendor centric. My preference is for training that is less about the knobs and switches of a particular technology and more about the ideas behind threats and countermeasures.
I was really pleased to get a mailing from (ISC)2 the other day. It introduced courses that are free for members that providing training and CPEs. Much of the training looks to be very relevant to my interests and I’m very excited to get started!
Courses like:
…and others are all about topics that I expect to be quite enjoyable.
I also will be producing another post with some examples of phishing attacks I’ve received. Some that were quite good and nearly motivated me to reveal credentials.