“I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”
This was the winning joke from comedian Nick Helm at 2011’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival and possibly the closest that cybersec has ever come to being funny in mainstream comedy. So with the largest arts festival closing its doors for another year, we started to question the whimsy of our industry given the serious nature of threats we’re defending against.
Well it turns out that if you do want to exercise your sense of humour, phishing scams are probably the way to go… we’ve all guffawed when a particularly haphazardly-written email has found its way through to our inboxes, and comedians Joe Lycett and James Veitch have taken things to the next level by replying to these phishing emails, entertaining audiences with the hilarity that ensued.
So given it’s early September, and the entire office is in a post-holiday coma, we thought we’d break the monotony of the perpetual cyber doom media cycle and distract you with a few of our favourite ludicrous scams and subsequent responses. Enjoy. Do send us any we’ve missed. But watch out for real scams. And stay safe online!
The ‘stuck in space’ scam
The ‘I can put this assassination on hold’ scam
The ‘Mark Zuckerberg is a philanthropist’ scam
And what follows is another Zuckerberg scam this time on behalf of special agent Willy Nicolas, with a response from comedian, Joe Lycett:
The ‘I’m dying in hospital and want to send you my life savings’ scam (Courtesy of Joe Lycett)
The ‘lucrative business deal’ scam (Courtesy of James Veitch)
We can all have a laugh about email scams but only if we’re confident that our email domains are fully secured. If you need help implementing DMARC, the only definitive way to protect your email domain, please get in touch with a member of the team!