Phishing mails getting more clever
This is the second time I've received an email like this, and I wanted to point out a few things before people get caught by this rather clever phishing attempt:
As you can see, this email contains no linked images, which is completely unusual for Amazon but probably done to avoid being classified as Spam.
The URL that pops up when you hover over the button also looks legit at first… it is an email in German and it seems to point to a German amazon URL.
But of course it doesn't. What gives it away, of course, is the fact that there is a hyphen after the "www.amazon.de" with some further "legitimizing" text, after that comes some more mumbo-jumbo that has nothing to do with a server. When we look at line 4 of the URL, we see "ru/?". on the line above, right before the "ru" is a period. That is the country part of the URL. If we go back a bit to the previous period, that is the actual server name. Here: "hsdj…4735fdjshfdsas3234". Forgive me for smudging out a bit - that is to prevent anyone from keying in the URL to see what happens and my email being registered as "alive".
Everything before the server name is irrelevant information that is likely thrown away by the recipient http server process. What is relevant is the "/?id=…" bit, which identifies my email address in their database.
What tipped me off, too, is that I don't have an amazon.de account with the email address this was sent to.
However, I'm sure plenty of people will "bite" onto this phishing attempt.
Even with more legit looking emails, it always pays to look at the URL that clicking on something will activate just to make sure it doesn't go to some Russian server…!
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Update: Amazon.de replied to my tweet about this topic and sent this link to further information on how to identify legitimate Amazon emails.
As you can see, this email contains no linked images, which is completely unusual for Amazon but probably done to avoid being classified as Spam.
The URL that pops up when you hover over the button also looks legit at first… it is an email in German and it seems to point to a German amazon URL.
But of course it doesn't. What gives it away, of course, is the fact that there is a hyphen after the "www.amazon.de" with some further "legitimizing" text, after that comes some more mumbo-jumbo that has nothing to do with a server. When we look at line 4 of the URL, we see "ru/?". on the line above, right before the "ru" is a period. That is the country part of the URL. If we go back a bit to the previous period, that is the actual server name. Here: "hsdj…4735fdjshfdsas3234". Forgive me for smudging out a bit - that is to prevent anyone from keying in the URL to see what happens and my email being registered as "alive".
Everything before the server name is irrelevant information that is likely thrown away by the recipient http server process. What is relevant is the "/?id=…" bit, which identifies my email address in their database.
What tipped me off, too, is that I don't have an amazon.de account with the email address this was sent to.
However, I'm sure plenty of people will "bite" onto this phishing attempt.
Even with more legit looking emails, it always pays to look at the URL that clicking on something will activate just to make sure it doesn't go to some Russian server…!
—
Update: Amazon.de replied to my tweet about this topic and sent this link to further information on how to identify legitimate Amazon emails.
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