Once every few months I get an email like this. What is it? Phishing?
I've finally looked into it, and learned two important lessons.
Here's the body of the email.
Hello there, Your page http://www.itmaybeahack.com/homepage/iblog/C364310209/E20080407095503.html has some good references to cyber security so I wanted to get in touch with you. I've recently written an article The 6 Types Of Cyber Attacks To Protect Against In 2018 and was wondering if you thought my article could be a good addition to your page. You can read my article right here: https://pagely.com/blog/cyber-attacks-in-2018/ I would like to hear your opinion on this article. Also, if you find it useful, please consider linking to it from your page I mentioned earlier. If you prefer you may republish the article. Let me know what you think. Thank you very much,
Really?
The page they cited has three (3) external links. One is to actual cyber security content. Another now gets redirected to generic advertising, and the third (like the original blog post) is a decade old.
What does this mean?
Clearly, it means some bot found my page. One of the links was to something they're trying to SEO boost. (How do I know it's SEO? I don't. The email address is similar to an SEO boosting company, so it seems like that's what's going on here.)
I've been haphazard about responding to these because I'm a fundamentally charitable person.
Or I'm a total pushover to certain kinds of social engineering. You choose.
You see the appeal to my vanity in the email? They read my ancient content! Swoon!
The email looks personal. There's a name. Spelled consistently. With no digits in it. Someone read my content and reached out to me! I'm in love! Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life at last, I've found you!
The email makes me think -- somehow -- it's not a bot and there's a person involved. A person trying to make a buck selling content and advertising. I should help them, right? Amplify their signal and all?
What a chump I am! I should simply ignore these.
In the past, I have responded with a "Nope. That content is too old to do anything with. I should delete it but I'm too lazy." Once a bot found a link on live content, and I dutifully updated it. I now know any response is a mistake.
I checked out the page.ly site. It's a nice summary of cyber attacks. It seems to be a not-to-dangerous link to not-bad content. Except for the Unicode errors throughout the document. Like someone copied and pasted the original bytes -- intended for CP-1252 -- to a site explicitly using UTF-8.
That's not all.
The name on the email, and the author of the article don't match. The email says "my article" but the article has a different author.
Red Flag.
After (finally) spending five minutes on this, I learned two things.
- First: this is nonsense. It's some kind of phishing attack. Or some kind of SEO-boosting bot that doesn't check dates very well.
- Second: I'm an easy mark when people appeal to my vanity. I need to stop responding, no matter how effusive the (inferred) praise I think I'm hearing.