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2:21pm August 27, 2014

➸ I think I figured out those weird emails

feliscorvus:

whohasbeenrockingmydreamboat:

feliscorvus:

I’ve previously mentioned receiving bizarre/creepy emails sporadically over the past few months. I kept going back and forth between figuring they were the work of trolls or the work of spammers, but I think what they actually are/were is something called spear phishing, i.e.:

“Spear phishing…

Reblogging cus I never heard of this, but people with an internet should learn about it.

Yeah that’s why I posted about it, because apparently spammers/phishers/identity-thieves have gotten a lot more sophisticated while I haven’t even been paying attention. And I figured I couldn’t be the only one so I wanted to get the word out.

I used to think I was really good at spotting fake emails, etc., but I will never take that for granted again.

There is apparently this whole thing called “social engineering” that is being applied by black-hat-type hackers (the nasty kind, not the benevolent kind).

When used in conjunction with phishing, you can get some seriously creepy-seeming stuff going on even though the people doing it largely rely on publicly available information.

But a lot of people don’t even realize that things like their street address, full name, age, and family members/housemates can be identified and connected to them personally by someone doing a simple google search. Which is actually fairly new of a thing; it didn’t used to be quite as easy as it is now.

I try not to worry about it too much, but being almost-phished(?) recently has made me way more cautious about email. I check the headers now if it’s from someone I don’t know, and if anything seems “off” about a message ostensibly from someone I *do* know, I don’t trust it.