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Moonrise2473 OP ,

The content of this “important notification” is that to remind me that on January 18, 2025, they will delete the data of Google Currents, because they killed it. I even didn’t know what that product was.

Swedneck ,
@Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

google currents sounds like some sort of phenomenon, like an ocean current that pushes stuff onto the shore where we discover it.

rxin ,

Google Currents is the Google strategy of “The Less Products I Have The Better”

UltraMagnus0001 ,

So many things have died. GOOGLE KILLS.

Serinus ,

Goodbye Chromecast!

Hello, thing that’s totally not Chromecast.

BrikoX ,
@BrikoX@lemmy.zip avatar

A good rule of thumb is to never click on links in emails. Always go to the domain manually.

Moonrise2473 OP ,

They know my name, yet they wrote “Dear Google Workspace Administator” as the most generic phishing attempts.

Hector_McG ,

I doubt more than 6 people at Google knew what it was.

Rhynoplaz ,

Were you expecting a Google employee to notice the issue, think “Uh oh, I better let Moonrise know about this!” and type out an email for you?

Vent ,

Email templates are ubiquitous and can easily insert names and any other variable.

Moonrise2473 OP , (edited )

Do you know that’s trivial to write a marketing email like

“Dear <name placeholder>…”

I get that Google is just a startup with limited resources and can’t afford expensive marketing tools, but this is a basic feature offered in every marketing email software, even free ones.

The reason is that a phishing scammer usually just got a leaked/stolen email list without names, and by stating “dear <name>” they show that it’s not a phishing.

Once you train users that generic emails with “click here to read the message” are legit, then phishers have an easier life.

In this specific case they’re just announcing that a Google service that nobody was using has been killed (as is tradition) and they’re going to delete the data, there’s no reason at all to have a “click here to read”.

rxin ,

Yeah actually, any non-spam email should always address you by name and that’s a rule. Many services also have this in their e-mail footers “This e-mail is for XXXXX” etc. because a typical mass sent garbage mail won’t know your name.

chrisbit ,
@chrisbit@leminal.space avatar

Had the same reaction to this email today!

dysprosium ,

It’s also annoying that Microsoft sends links via sms using a really scratchy looking domain (aka.ms). Turns out they’re legit

BlueSquid0741 ,

But there are so many dodgy similar looking ones that auto complete if you’re typing it.

I went to type in the aka.ms to find a bit locker recovery key. And didn’t realise it autocorrected to something like akam.ms and it was a super sketchy site about bit locker recovery. Luckily I realised straight away even MS wouldn’t host a website like the one I saw.

azertyfun ,

They got the .microsoft TLD a while back specifically for this purpose. Supposedly they want to migrate all their cloud services there, but I learned about that a year ago and I’ve only seen it in use once since (IIRC on Loop…)

And let’s not forget about facebookmail.com, the official mail server for Facebook login notifications since 2004.

The tech is here, the risks are enormous, but the corpos don’t care because they don’t bear the costs of phishing attacks and governments are too impotent to enforce minimum standards of cybersecurity.

tias ,

Their latest iteration of Teams runs on teams.cloud.microsoft.

azertyfun , (edited )

Looks like that works but my bookmark is on teams.microsoft.com and there’s no redirect whatsoever. Hopefully they’ll get there in a few months’ time.

Angry_Autist ,

Only reason I knew that was akamai was their hosting for their previous ISO distro system, it does look phish af.

Baku ,

I had to make a police report yesterday, and they wanted me to upload evidence. The (text) message they sent was along the lines of: “A. Last name requests evidence from you. Click here to submit evidence. vp.au/evidence”

Swedneck ,
@Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

dear sirs, please submit the evidences to do the needful, very thanks.

Eiri ,

I can see why they would want that. They may consider email to be inherently less safe than their platform, so they don’t send any sensitive information there.

Canada’s government stuff also generally works that way, except without any links.

I’m not sure how legit their concerns are, but it’s a thing.

Canada Revenue Agency notice

Carighan ,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

In fact a lot of things do:

  • My bank
  • All monthly work pay notifications
  • All tax notifications

It’s just normal to not include the actual information. But like you say, except sometimes the bank, they don’t include links.

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