I receive a lot of email each day so it is not an unusual occurrence for me to receive various phishing attempts over time. Yesterday I received another one that was trying to gain info from me about my Twitter account and I want to share it with you here to help you become more aware of how these emails look so you can protect yourself.
Twitter Phishing E-mail
So above you can see the email I received claiming to be from Twitter. It looks pretty official since it has a Twitter logo and is informing you that you have notifications pending at Twitter.com.
Now this email has been sent in HTML format which is a typical method to hide destination links from the individuals they have sent the email to. Sending an email in HTML format is a spammers dream because it allows them to format a link with any text they want but have the actual link go to their spam or malware related site.
Now there is a benefit to this HTML formatting for those of us who may receive these emails and that is we can hover our mouse cursor over the link in the email and a small pop up window will show us the actual link underneath the formatted link in the email.
In the case of the email I received above the actual site being linked to is a website in Spain. In fact, every link in this email is formatted to access the same site.
I have no idea if they are serving up malware at that link or just want your click to increase their traffic and thus increase their standing in search engines, etc. but whatever they are serving I am not going to be visiting to find out. It is just safer that way.
So next time you get that email that looks like it is official from a company or brand you do business with take the time to examine the links and hover your mouse over them to see where it is really going.
What examples have you seen of spam or phishing emails?
