Cybersecurity Blog

New Google feature looks like phishing – 03/25/2021

 

Google has launched a new feature for Google meet. Any time there are more than two people in a meeting, you will automatically receive an attendance list attached to an email. This email has the name of the meeting in the subject line. This works great when you have created the meeting in your calendar and given it a name. The email makes sense and it looks legit.

However, if you create the meeting through the Google chat or the Meet button in the Gmail window, there is no way to give the meeting a name, so Google does that for you. As a result you end up with an email subject line that includes a bunch of random capital letters in quotes.

At first glance this email looks really, really phishy. You have this weird looking subject, an attachment and you didn’t request an attendance report. But if you take a closer look at the sender’s email address, you realize that this is in fact coming from Google and it is a legitimate email.

If you receive an email like this and you are uncertain what to do with it, then please report it. However, hopefully now that you have a little more information you won’t feel so quite uncomfortable when that odd email shows up unannounced from Google.

 

 

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