by Dan Moren
Phishing for clues
TidBITS’s Adam Engst does yeoman’s work in breaking down what looks suspicious about emails with annotated screenshots:
I’ve been examining phishing attempts for so long that it’s hard for me to imagine what might fool someone else, so I wanted to share some recent attempts that slipped past Gmail’s filters. For each message, I’ve called out some of the ways I identified it as phishing. I suspect that most of you will assume that you would also easily have identified the message as fake, but remember, many people move rapidly through their email without reading carefully. Perhaps my calling out of some of the hallmarks of phishing attempts can help you or the people to whom you forward this article avoid being drawn in.
This is fantastic. Many of us probably deal with these attempts at getting our personal information all the time and have grown used to discounting them, but we also all have people in our lives who may just not know what to look for. Moreover, as Adam points out, phishing attempts are only getting more complex, sophisticated, and tricky, thanks to innovations like AI-written copy. Adam’s piece is a great overview of what to look for, and definitely one that I’ll be bookmarking to send to some people in my life.