3 ms·
And that's the rub: knowing what's phishing depends on who you are. Receiving a PDF with financial data has a completely different probability of being an atta
by ken 8y ago
And that's the rub: knowing what's phishing depends on who you are. Receiving a PDF with financial data has a completely different probability of being an attack if you know who the sender is and were expecting them to send such a file today.
Also, assuming that a message is phishing is usually not harmful in any way. If I got an email from dropbox.com (and were a Dropbox customer), I'd ignore the email, and just type "dropbox.com" in my web browser to see what's up. If you're paranoid, you don't need to be super smart about what exactly is phishing.
This isn't a fair test.
- cbanek 8y agoThis is exactly what I do for any kind of account stuff: never click on the email, always just sign into the website itself and look for the message. I really like the companies that just say "sign in and see a new message" or whatever, rather than, "click on this link."
- londons_explore 8y agoPDF's especially are pretty low risk. They normally open with the in-chrome PDF viewer, which is sandboxed pretty much as well as web pages, so you would need two zero day exploits (since chrome generally auto-updates within a few days of an axploit being published) in addition to tricking them into opening the PDF to get into someones device.
- beatgammit 8y agoSame with Firefox. In fact, I rarely open PDFs outside of Firefox, and when I do, it's either in Edge (if I'm on Windows) or Evince (on Linux). I never use Abobe Reader, so there's very little chance that I'll get attacked. And yes, I failed that question because I assumed that it's information that I was expecting. I don't open PDFs unless I am expecting it, because who wants to spend the time waiting for it to download and render for something that's likely spam?