Google Email phishing Scam Attack

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April 17th, 2008 by Click Consult

Over Easter, many adwords advertisers opened their inbox to find Easter gifts from Google. Card payment failures, disapproved ads and payment details requiring updates all appeared to flood in while we were having Easter dinner.

Quickly, details were checked and links were clicked as PPC advertisers panicked at the though out their advertising being off. Only when the interfaces did not show any issues did the real alarm bells start ringing!

It is more likely that most adwords advertisers did realise what was going on. These emails were not from Google, but cleverly designed to appear as such. Phishing emails are not uncommon for users of many online services.

Phishing is the term used to describe the emails sent and received with the purpose of tricking users into entering login details to a bogus or faked web site. It was the one of the biggest stumbling blocks for eBay and Paypal and has been a potential issue for Google.

Spotting these bogus Google emails is easy with a little experience. The email source address is cleverly masked to look like a Google email and the links contained will look at least similar to official Google login pages. The thing I find almost disappointing is the basic errors contained within the email. That a fraudster would go to the lengths of designing a web page, masking email referrer source and addresses, but then mis-spell the content of the email! One received by a client recently had the subject line “Your AdWords Google Account is stoped”.

There are tools that can be used to identify the fraudulent and phishing web sites. An add-on for firefox was specifically designed by Google to highlight faked web pages.

The only safe rule of thumb would be to not open or rely on email notifications. When receiving an error from Google, go direct to the Adwords interface and find the issue. Any issues will show up as alerts in the interface and will be easily dealt with. After all to manage a PPC it should be checked every day!

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