Everyone Is Falling for This Frighteningly Effective Gmail Scam | Hacker News Reader

Everyone Is Falling for This Frighteningly Effective Gmail Scam

fortune.com

16 pointsgits122512 comments

So I'm assuming that the image is a hyperlink, and that this link contains the "data:text/html" webpage designed to trick users.

So couldn't Google flag emails which have links to "data:text/html" as suspicious?

Even if it came from a known contact, I can't imagine normal people emailing around links with "data:text/html" as the link target.

Could be a redirect from a regular URL: Gmail -> Attacker's website -> data:text/html

The attacker's website would only be visible for half a second, and users are used to the dance of redirects before a login page, so this makes it not suspicious

> Could be a redirect from a regular URL: Gmail -> Attacker's website -> data:text/html

Sure, I agree it's a game of cat and mouse. But GMail's spam filter in my experience is pretty good, so if Google started flagging these messages as spam based on the link contents/website it would help reduce the success rate.

Previous discussions from when this was first highlighted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13372985

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13408078

How is this different from just copying the Google login page to a website you control, with a URL that includes the right words?

It is not that different, but the art is in the attention to details (the sender can be posed as your colleague) and subtlety in execution.

Clickbait title

The title is not bait. It describes the post correctly and does not mislead you. Just pointing it out; I did not change the title.

Sure it is. 'This' is a terrible way describe an article. In fact it leaves to the imagination what the scam is about, it might as well be another run of the mill phishing email for all I know. The point here is to make me click to find out what it refers to, therefore, clickbait. To increase this effect they start off with 'everyone is falling for', which signals urgency but again doesn't convey anything about the scam's nature. If you abstract away the clickbait you end up with 'effective gmail scam'.

This is on fortune.com by the way, I'm not calling you out. The submission title is the same as the article's, but that one is trash.

I'd like to know more. I feel in this case the title should convey the urgency with enough context. Which it does in my opinion. Just "Effective GMail Scam" would not make me care enough to click through to the post. It is the fact that "Everyone is Falling" that alerted me to the importance of the post.

The purpose for a title is to both communicate the content and attract the viewer. I'd use something a bit more descriptive, along the lines of "new Gmail phishing technique hijacks sign-on page".

We can agree to disagree on this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com