So we are selling a house right now, which involves signing an absurd number of forms, many of which we have already signed, and that all have to be re-signed by everyone every time so much as a comma changes. So I'm constantly getting emails from the title company demanding that we go to a document signing website to re-sign things.
So this afternoon, I got the email in the photo on the left and thought "Great, we've got a closing date!" And I was reaching for my mouse when I remembered that we aren't even using First America Title to do the closing. So the entire email was just bait to get me to click on it -- they send them out by the millions, and some fraction of people end up snared by malware that downloads on their computer when they click on the links in the email. This is called a "spearphishing attack."
To confirm it was spearphishing, I hovered my mouse over the sending email address, and sure enough, it has nothing to do with any real title company. It's no doubt a spoofed address for some criminal somewhere.
So good reminders:
1. Never click on links in unknown mail, especially mail made up to look all official.
2. Learn to use your mouse to hover over sender email address so you can always double check suspicious emails by seeing the actual sending email instead of just looking at the displayed email (as in the photo on the right).
So this afternoon, I got the email in the photo on the left and thought "Great, we've got a closing date!" And I was reaching for my mouse when I remembered that we aren't even using First America Title to do the closing. So the entire email was just bait to get me to click on it -- they send them out by the millions, and some fraction of people end up snared by malware that downloads on their computer when they click on the links in the email. This is called a "spearphishing attack."
To confirm it was spearphishing, I hovered my mouse over the sending email address, and sure enough, it has nothing to do with any real title company. It's no doubt a spoofed address for some criminal somewhere.
So good reminders:
1. Never click on links in unknown mail, especially mail made up to look all official.
2. Learn to use your mouse to hover over sender email address so you can always double check suspicious emails by seeing the actual sending email instead of just looking at the displayed email (as in the photo on the right).
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