It's true: I was the victim of a phishing attack in 2017. The term “victim” is a bit of an exaggeration, because the moment I clicked on the link, I knew that something was wrong. If I hadn't been distracted by all sorts of work and my iPhone at that time, I would never have made this mistake. This attack taught me what I should have known a long time ago: There is no such thing as innocent surfing on the Internet!
However, this attack was brilliant: it was one of the most successful on Twitter.com to date. It was a “private message,” poorly typed and seemingly urgent, from a follower that said: “I can't do it [sic!] believe, but this is where some really bad [sic!] Things said about you gourl.kr/ap7hlp. “I received this message from a good friend who in turn ran an important collaborative website, and I had just returned from a conference: the circumstances and context were therefore almost perfect, even though the spelling mistakes and the language used should have pointed out the obvious falsity of the message (my acquaintance was actually far too professional to send such a half-baked message). This phishing attack not only infected my Twitter.com account, but it also meant that everyone who followed me on this platform was also — indirectly through me — phished. Accordingly, I was outed as extremely careless and possibly somewhat naive.
Predictably, many people contacted me directly and told me what I already knew at the time — namely that I had been the victim of a concerted phishing campaign. What added to the shame was the need to bother all my contacts so that the “private messages” I had supposedly sent them were anything but confidential! This experience made me realize that I had simply taken the wrong approach to social networks so far: I should only make friends with people I don't care about!
“Spam or phishing has now become another way to say “I love you.” ”
Despite this obvious polemic, there was a positive side effect that turned me away from such a thoroughly cynical idea: since I had hardly ever tweeted in the past, the phishing attack allowed me to reach people to whom I was apparently important enough to skim over the 280 character comments I had supposedly written. Spam or phishing has now become another way to say “I love you.”
A certain exchange made this fact very strikingly clear to me: a colleague close to me received my contaminated message and was really happy; she fell for the scam, just like myself before. She wrote me the following message afterwards: “Yes, my first thought was 'Jonas Kellermeyer thought of me! 'When I realized that it was spam, it was a massive damper.” I answered back then, only half jokingly: “Perhaps that is the advantage of spam: namely that automatically thought of for everyone “The social network logic that characterizes human relationships in general is what spam adopts, which it corrupts and whose sheer dynamism it uses to spread potentially harmful content virally.
The moral of this short story: No one, really no one, is immune from falling on the proverbial glue of such a criminal scam! That's why it's so incredibly important that employees keep themselves informed, stay alert and ultimately avoid the same mistakes I've made in the past... Don't let your ego fool you!
