Beware of This Clever Phishing Scam on Gmail
With a little bit of know-how, most phishing attacks are fairly easy to detect. This one on the other hand is pretty darn smart and can trick you if you’re not careful.
This phishing scam works very simply. Wordfence, which has shed light on the scam , says the attacker creates an email address to disguise himself as someone you know. They then send you an email with an attachment like PDF or Word that looks legitimate. When you click on an attachment to see a preview of it, you are redirected to the Google login page where you enter your credentials.
The catch: these attachments are not attachments – they are inline images that look like attachments leading to a fake Google login page. You can see an example of how real they look in Tom Scott’s tweet below.
To make matters worse, everything on the fake Google login page looks fine. It has a logo, text boxes, and a slogan. The only difference is in the address bar, where careful eyes will see that the page is actually a data URI prefixed with “data: text / htyml” and not a URL with the standard “https: //”. But if you don’t notice it, attackers will get your information and use it to send other phishing emails to your contacts.
Since then, Google has updated Chrome to version 56.0.2924, which makes it easier to detect such fake forms, but doesn’t stop this type of scam in its path. Whether you’re using Chrome or not, it’s important to stay vigilant and keep a close eye on yourself when checking your email.