Last fall I wrote about and made a brief video about a phishing rip-off wherein the sender pretends to be from YouTube help. Yesterday, I noticed a brand new variation on that very same rip-off seem in my inbox.
As you may see within the screenshot above, the e-mail topic line is Copyright Warning.pdf and the from handle is YouTube Support (Google Docs). In the e-mail there may be only a hyperlink to a PDF that seems to be shared by way of Google Drive from YouTube. There are a couple of purple flags in that electronic mail that immediately advised me this was a rip-off. Here they’re:
1. The electronic mail that this was despatched to isn’t the e-mail handle that’s linked to my YouTube account. In different phrases, it is not the one I take advantage of to log into and add to my YouTube channel.
2. In my precise YouTube account there weren’t any warnings within the copyright part.
3. YouTube/ Google does not ship PDFs by way of Google Drive to inform you of issues together with your YouTube account or some other Google product.
The distinction between the rip-off electronic mail I acquired yesterday and the one which I obtained final fall is that yesterday’s did not use a generic Gmail handle because the “from” handle. Instead, it was modified to make it seem like it got here from a “no reply google docs” handle.
If you are curious about a video walk-through of this rip-off, watch my quick video under.
Applications for Education
I prefer to take rip-off electronic mail makes an attempt like this one and use them as the premise for brief classes about cybersecurity. Emails the just like the one I obtained at this time have some tell-tale indicators of a rip-off which can be pretty straightforward to identify. See in case your college students can spot them.
Some related scams that I’ve unraveled within the final couple of years embrace this one about picture attribution and this one additionally about picture attribution from somebody pretending to be a lawyer.