| I believe I was the target of employment-flavored spear phishing a few months ago. Could have been a researcher like the OP. - 3 new email chains from different sources in a couple weeks, all similar inquiries to see if I was interested in work (I wasn't at the time, and I receive these very rarely) - escalating specificity, all referencing my online presence, the third of which I was thinking about a month later because it hit my interests squarely - only the third acknowledged my polite declining - for the third, a month after, the email and website were offline - the inquiries were quite restrained, having no links, and only asking if I was interested, and followed up tersely with an open door to my declining I have no idea what's authentic online anymore, and I think it's dangerous to operate your online life with the belief that you can discern malicious written communications with any certainty, without very strong signals like known domains. Even realtime video content is going to be a problem eventually. I suppose we'll continue to see VPN sponsorships prop up a disproportionate share of the creator economy. In other news Google routed my mom to a misleading passport renewal service. She didn't know to look for .gov. Oh well. |