Phishy Phacebook Email

[Ghel]

My bank has a long-standing anti-social-media policy. They have decided NOT to have a social media presence and resist any attempts to have their collective mind changed.

So I was surprised and a little bemused to receive an email purporting to be from Facebook claiming that my bank has invited me to follow them on Facebook. Complete with links, including an unsubscribe link. All the links (when I hover over them) go someplace besides face book dot com. It even has fb's and my bank's logos in the email.

Pretty sophisticated little phishing email.

[Deserted]

Not all that sophisticated, and not new either. I got one from "my bank" around a decade ago, very similar (although nothing to do with FB).

[Smapti]

That's a pretty big leap of logic on their part to assume you like your bank.

[Ghel]

Right. Possibly understatement, but I'm certainly not invested enough in my workplace to have it spill into my personal life, including social media.

[Mikkel]

And anyway, I'm to paranoid to friend my insurance or bank. You never know when they are going to use the information against you.

[Pixelated]

I almost miss the days before we had really good spam filters. I used to get emails from banks I'd never even heard of (and which might not have even existed) telling me my account had been hacked and I needed to contact them NOW.

Even better were the emails telling me I had some extra money coming to me in honour of my service with the U.S. military.

I'm Canadian.

[Ghel]

Our IT guy sent out a company-wide email today, explaining that the bank had hired an auditing firm to send out fake spam emails purporting to be from FB, Amazon, and the company we use for secure email. They sent out 100 emails to 70 employees and had a 9% click-through rate.

The upshot? Be more careful, and don't click on links in suspicious emails. Duh!

I bet IT guy was amused when I emailed him about the spam email that my coworkers and I were getting.

[Argus]

Our IT guy sent out a company-wide email today, explaining that the bank had hired an auditing firm to send out fake spam emails purporting to be from FB, Amazon, and the company we use for secure email.

We have the same thing where I work, although it's more general. (Earlier this year, one purported sender was the county health department.) Also, they recently pushed out an Outlook add-on that handles reporting phishing emails to IT.
That add-on might be from the same testing company. It certainly recognizes those emails and congratulates anyone who reports one that way.

[SpyOne]

I was thinking it might be a test - I watch videos of guys who do that stuff for a living speaking at conferences for such people.

My absolute favorite was the guys who got permission to send targeting emails (they call it "spear phishing", because you know who you're phishing and not just casting a wide net) to seven people of their choice.

"Five of them clicked the link, including the guy who hired us."

[Ghel]

It's kind of funny because I'm pretty sure Ted got hit with actual malware from an email attachment about two weeks ago. He send a company-wide email not to open any attachments from such-and-such customer and contact the IT Guy if you already opened one.

[MadMike]

We have the same thing where I work, although it's more general.

They do the same thing at my job as well. Most of them are so ridiculous that I can't believe some people actually fall for them.

[EricKei]

Mike -- If people are still falling for them, that suggests to me that they're not ridiculous enough.