Example of Spam/Phish Email - seemingly from a System Administrator

Periodically, we remind you to be aware of fake emails, which often carry viruses or spamming capabilities, all of which can be detrimental to your system. Today we received another such email and decided this would be a good time to show you yet another example of how tricky these emails can be.

Note that it appears to be legit because it is coming from “System Administrator”. And the Subject appears to be harmless enough stating that you had an Undeliverable Message.

Since our settings are set to “AutoPreview” (which is different than “Preview Pane”) – we can see that the message is To: harpula@homesite.com with a Subject: of Not Read: Amazing, Jonah.

This is our most readily available clue that this is a hoax since we do not know that email address nor would we have had that subject. 

However, having said that – there are times when the To: and the Subject: may be generic enough to fool you. That’s why it’s always better to error on the side of caution. If you’re just not sure – delete it anyway. It’s better to have the sender re-send their information if it was legit, than to take the risk of infecting your system, your network, all your network’s users, and potentially every single email address in your Outlook. 

The thing to take particular notice of in this email is the attachment – marked by the little paperclip. It is always best to simply delete these emails without even opening it. However, if you should mistakenly open one – and then notice that it doesn’t appear to be from anyone you know or has strange or excess letters located in the email – please ABOVE ALL ELSE – never, Never, NEVER open an attachment from anyone that you do not know, or has strange writing.