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It's not everyday that I get tripped up by a phishing email, but even after 20+ years in the industry, I do find myself caught off guard on occasion. Today, this email nearly caught me because I was reading it on my phone. 1/10
One of the things about the phone (and tablets) is that the mail apps hide a lot of information from us that would otherwise tip us off immediately -- things like the actual email address of the sender! 2/10
This is a classic case of an email that I wasn't expecting, which should make it suspect -- but since I just bought a bunch of computing stuff for my son, it was possible that I'd accidentally signed up for a "Free" trial of Norton that would automatically renew. 3/10
The email relies on surprise and fear. I was not expecting to get a bill for nearly $300 and my initial reaction was to respond saying, "I'm not your customer. How do I get this rectified?" 4/10
It was only when I started to reply to the email that I noticed the tell tale sign that this was bogus -- It came from a http://gmail.com address. This would have been a bad call, it would have shown that they'd reached an actual human. 5/10
I decided to look at the email in more details in Google and I've annotated some things that are important to notice. First, it passed all of Google's Spam Checks. 6/10
It passed the SPF check. SPF is the Sender Policy Framework built into mail servers. Basically it relies on records to specify what IP addresses and domains can originate email for a given domain. 7/10
It also passed the DKIM and DMARC checks. DKIM is a cryptographic signature on email. DMARC is another check based on domain names. It passed all the checks because it was sent through Google servers from a http://gmail.com domain. 8/10
There are some tell tale signs that it's not legitimate in the message. The product key is way too short for it to be real. There are a number of grammar mistakes, and it essentially tells the receiver that no one will answer the number listed and requests PII. 9/10
I did go and check all my credit cards and was happy to find no charges for Norton's security suite. I hope that these screenshots are helpful to you to spot malicious email in the future. 10/10
