LinkedIn Spam

Posted: Thursday, July 14th, 2011 by Ted

If you’re like millions of other folks on the internet, you probably use LinkedIn to manage your business contacts. There’s a new spam variant that’s out that appears to be from LinkedIn and, honestly, it’s really good. It darn-near got me and a few of my coworkers.

Here’s what it looks like:

 

Pretty legit looking right? Well, if you mouse over the part that says “Follow this link” it actually shows this:

 

The domain “view-linkedin-report-1313444blog.com” was registered today, July 14th 2011, with Wild West Domains but there’s no contact information given regarding who registered it and it’s definitely not a real link to linkedin.com.  Both of which issues raise red flags and would tell you to avoid clicking on the link. I took one for the team and clicked on the link but it had already been pulled by its provider for violating spam and abuse policies.

This just goes  to show that you should be cautious about everything that comes into your mailbox and that, if in doubt, log into the site that “sent” you the message but not from the included link and see what’s what.