I Email Like A Spammer

I know a lot of people think “Oh, I’d never fall for social engineering emails, they’re all so easy to pick out” but I look at my own emails and it becomes clear that that isn’t the case.

A lot of spam and malware is sent through hacked email accounts, twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, etc. Normally it’s easy to pick out the spam by poor grammar or spelling, and spam emails have a very specific ‘look’ to them. You’ll get a lot of short messages that are basically “Cool link” and a link to some exploit page.

Looking at my own emails that I send I’ve realized that that’s the exact format I use. I put one word in the subject and a link. And that’s  a typical email for me – I do that a lot. I’ve seen spammers send less spammy emails and if someone sent me an email like that I’d probably not assume it’s spam.

Ask yourself, if you got an email from a recognized address saying “This made me laugh”, would you click the link? I would.

So don’t rely on being able to catch everything with common sense.