This sophisticated phishing scam has the entire internet terrified

[froggyboy604]

Employees at multiple organizations that use Google for email, as well as thousands of personal Gmail customers, are all reporting the same scam.

It starts with an email from a known contact, which says that the person has shared a Google Doc with you. You’re invited to click the link to open, which redirects you to a legitimate Google sign-in page. You’re prompted to select one of your Google accounts (remember: this is all using Google’s normal sign-in system), and then authorize a legit-looking app called “Google Docs” to manage your emails.

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I think using an offline Office program like LibreOffice may prevent this scam.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

Lol! And my old school just changed their email service to gmail.

That sucks though, I imagine there is a lot of IT headaches right now.

 

[CM30]

This is not going to help when I interview people for Gaming Reinvented. Cause I use Google Docs to track the interview, with the interviewee adding their answers in the blank spaces between questions.

Unfortunately, this scam means that people might look at the whole deal and think of it as too risky. Thanks scammer guys...

 

[froggyboy604]

Lol! And my old school just changed their email service to gmail.

That sucks though, I imagine there is a lot of IT headaches right now.

I think there are similar phishing scams for most other e-mail services. There maybe more phishing scams on smaller e-mail services where it is easier to cover up phishing scams, or blame the user for getting scammed by a phishing scam.

Some small e-mail providers also don't have a lot of Security staff which discover these problems, and people need to rely on a third-party e-mail client, and their antivirus and firewall from protecting them from phishing scams.

People need to be careful to not click on links on e-mails unless they are expecting their friends and family to send them a link to a website or file attachment.

I read on a tech blog that John McAfee, who is McAfee Antivirus inventor, use a phone to call an e-mail's sender to ask them if they sent them an e-mail, and if the e-mail contains links and file attachment before even opening the e-mail, and clicking on links and attachments. I bet, he probably also scans the e-mail for viruses and scam links with multiple virus and phishing scam scanners before he even clicks on it.

It is probably safest to physically contact e-mail users before opening their e-mails to prevent virus, and phishing scams from happening.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

This is not going to help when I interview people for Gaming Reinvented. Cause I use Google Docs to track the interview, with the interviewee adding their answers in the blank spaces between questions.

Unfortunately, this scam means that people might look at the whole deal and think of it as too risky. Thanks scammer guys...

maybe just use a MS word doc instead?

 

[froggyboy604]

maybe just use a MS word doc instead?

Using PM private messaging for interviews may also be an option where you send users a list of question to fill out, and they copy and paste the questions which they answered as a reply. There may also be forum mods which let you make forms for people to fill out for interviews for mod, and admin positions on the forum.

Newer MS Word document files sometimes have incompatibility problems where you can't open a Word 2007 .docx file with Word 2003 and earlier version of Word. Word files had Macro viruses which can infect a PC if the antivirus can't stop the infection, so some people don't like opening Word files unless they have no choice because their boss or classmate sent them a Word file to work on.

 

[OursIsTheFury]

They can try, but my email is full of spam anyway so they won't find anything useful there. I haven't used it to send anything from messages to documents in years, so I'm pretty sure I'll be fine if the world's email system gets into the hands of hackers and terrorists or whatever.