And those emails from your best friend in some foreign country who was robbed and needs money to get home.
I only help them if they’re promising to bring my unexpected inheritance from a distant relative.
I’ll take this opportunity to give some other email safety reminders:
- Don’t open links or especially attachments in emails unless you’re really sure who they’re from and that they’re expected. Putting malware in an email body is (relatively) difficult; putting it in another linked page or an attachment is relatively trivial.
- Pay attention to the actual sender address. Lots of email clients hide the sender address now for simplicity, only showing the sender’s display name which is relatively easily spoofed. Different clients have ways of expanding the full address. Spam can say it’s from, for example, Apple Support, but when you expand the address it’s something like
support@randomnonapplesite.com.
- Not all phishing is Nigerian prince type stuff. The better stuff can be targeted and often takes advantage of what the spammer knows about you. A few months ago Navico / C-Map was hacked and contact information for customers was lost. If that was done by a phishing organization those customers should be on the lookout for “warning, your C-Map subscription is expiring, click here to renew” type emails. These targeted messages are more plausible than general spam and more likely to get clicks. Again, pay attention to the actual sender addresses and any link addresses.
