;)
Beware Google Phishing Attacks
Posted by Kupr in Online Tools
A client of ours was recently a victim of a phising attack. An email was sent to them indicating that their Adwords account had stopped running and that they should verify their account to get things up and going again.
Unfortunately the client fell for this and entered their Google account details. It appears that the attackers then got access to their Adwords account and added a number of keywords and ad text. The keywords they added were generic ones, and would have had the ability to spend a significant amount of the clients budget. The ad text they added was far from relevant to the client to say the least.
Luckily the account management team spotted the issues and immediately deleted the additions. This is quite worrying on a number of levels. One, the client didn’t just refer the original email to the agency to deal with, this is after all what they pay their fees for, and two that the browsers they are using didn’t pick it up. I’ve just tried the link in the email, and my browser Firefox 3.6 immediately warned me of the possible danger, and prevented me from visiting the page.
In the end, very little damage was done, although this was largely down to an attentive account team. This incident does remind us of the very real threat out there, and should serve as a prompt to users to update their browsers to the latest versions. It should also remind people to think twice about what data they are happy to send to someone on the back of an unexpected email.
Related Links
;)
;)
