Today I got an unusual email, spam actually, but of a particular kind tat I found interesting enough to check several URL links in it for potential phishing or communicable malware, appearing in the form of buttons, to get more information.
I say it is “spam”, and weird enough for me to feel suspicious of, because it is an invitation to visit online an exhibition at a private art gallery I never heard of, and this exhibition opened a few days ago and closes tomorrow. Normally, such an invitation is sent in advance of the event, not almost at the end. In any case, the artists whose works are being exhibited either do not interest me (Warhol) or I’ve never heard of. The works being shown, according to the email, are “post-Warhol”, a recent period in Western art that generally does not appeal to me enough to bother watching its works, even online. So how come I got selected to be invited?
Now I am going to describe the procedure I followed, so others might comment on it and maybe suggest other perhaps even better ways of doing this, without spending a lot of time doing it.
I did not open the email, but did my checking on its image in the preview pane. On the advice from some of you here, for a while I have been using this Google Website to do the checking:
Where one pasts the URL of each link in succession (here garnered by hovering the pointer over each button) on a field available for this and clicks a looking-glass shaped icon.
Here is the beginning of one of those suspect links (copied first to an ASCII file):
First, the prefix is “https” etc, and then : “us1-usndr.com/en/mail_link_tracker?hash=6rkb34rq…” followed by a whole lot more data. (There is something odd here at AskWoody that insists in making anything that starts in “https” and two slashes into html, even if it is plain text when viewed as “text”.)
A second later comes the verdict. In my case this always was:
“Google Transparency Report, Safe Browsing site status: No unsafe content found”
Followed by this note:
“Google’s Safe Browsing technology examines billions of URLs per day looking for unsafe websites. Every day, we discover thousands of new unsafe sites, many of which are legitimate websites that have been compromised. When we detect unsafe sites, we show warnings on Google Search and in web browsers. You can search to see whether a website is currently dangerous to visit.”
I did not click on any of the email links, anyway, and I deleted the email itself, after taking a screen shot of the more relevant part of the message:
Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).
MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV
