An Email from Facebook – Not!
Yesterday I received this spam email, “Here’s some activity you may have missed on Facebook.”
It looks quite Kosher, but I always check mails that want me to click on a link to a website. Just as well! It wasn’t going to send me to Facebook al all, but to somewhere else entirely. Actually www.hausfrisia.de is the web site of a holiday villa, but not the page in question. A hacker has hijacked their site, or their DNS.
This happened to a small business in Portishead earlier this year. Read about it here.
Don’t Click a Link
CHECK BEFORE YOU CLICK – even if you recognise the sender. It may be too late afterwards. Remember, the better-known the sender, the more likely they are to be imitated.
- Check the From address, in this case it’s, Facebook [agroinfo@pub….rect] agroinfo? Isn’t that enough on its own?
- Hover on the link, DON’T CLICK, and check the target web page address. In Outlook, example right, it appears in a small window, but Thunderbird displays it in the status bar at the bottom.
- Is the link plausible? In this case, NO – it’s nothing like Facebook!
- Still not sure? Check all the links. If they all go to the same web page then get suspicious.
When in doubt, leave it out.
What to do next
If you’re happy, click that link.
If you’re not, mark it as Junk or delete it NOW. If it’s from someone famous, as this one is, search for what to do. In this case, I searched for facebook notify suspicious email. I found this page on the Facebook site, which asked me to forward the mail to phish@spamreport.facebook.com.
So that’s what I did.
Another Example
Another example arrived today, apparently from Fedex. Read our post here.