The Bastard Academic

This is not a post about transhumanism or integrated tech. This is about my horrible time management. And it is horrible. I've been doing my annual email cleanout, and found some dark neglected corners. A couple of years ago, I decided it might be a Good Thing to create some email rules to help keep my Inbox a bit tidier, and infinitely more readable. It turns out that this has worked, at least to make my Inbox workable. Unfortunately, it means that I have neglected some 350+ newsletters I actually enjoy reading. Because the email rules put them directly into subfolders (and in some cases, subfolders of subfolders (because I like to be organised)), and also I primarily use a mobile app, I tend to glance over these in favour of the ridiculous (100+) amounts of mail that still comes through the Inbox. I am not pleased with myself for this. I am also grateful that my current job does afford me multiple hours of time on a Monday to be able to contend with this backlog. I will be ...

As we know, there are ~235 billion emails sent per day, a number that keeps growing year-on-year. A staggering 48% of that traffic is spam of one description or another, a figure that has actually come down 21% in the past 4 years alone. Despite varying scams and spam being prevalent and well-known, still people fall for them and shell out hundreds of thousands of pounds to cyber criminals each year. Today, I’m going to take a look at an interesting blackmail spam email I received and break down how to identify this as something obviously a scam, and why it is also a phishing expedition as opposed to real blackmail. I’ve taken out my email details, but the rest is exactly how I got it: A Fun Blackmail Scam attempt The first to check, with every email you get not just the ones you suspect of being dodgy, is the sender name and email address. Now even a neo-luddite can spot that something is fishy here: 986@501.416 is clearly not a real email address. If you aren’t sur...