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...
Why Bastard Academic, you ask? You put the word Gentleman before both terms: the Gentleman Academic and the Gentleman Bastard (at least according to Scott Lynch). The intention here will be to collect some of my Cyber Security blogs for CoderSource.io, as well as supplementary information and resources on and around the field. I will also throw in the odd instructional post on things I'm learning or working on, as well as the occasional political theorising/ranting and philosophical musing.