Be wary of fake LinkedIn contact requests

David Heath
Thursday, 30 September 2010 22:35

Business IT - Security

Since Monday this week, the Internet has been awash with fake LinkedIn contact requests.  Please don't fall for them, you'll be really sorry.

According to the Cisco Security blog, for a 15 minute period last Monday, LinkedIn spam accounted for over 25% of all spam trapped by the company's patrolled systems and over much of the day averaged around 15% of all spam messages.

Judging by this writer's inbox, the onslaught hasn't abated at all during the entire week with a number of instances received over the past few hours and plenty more either deleted or caught by the email server as spam (not many, as none were ever flagged as spam in order to 'keep an eye on it').

Identifying the messages as spam is relatively easy.  The messages ALWAYS claims the recipient has "2 messages awaiting your response" and is always (well, for this writer at least) from people unknown.  Fortunately, this writer has more than two pending LinkedIn messages as (like many people) there are requests from people we'd really prefer just 'went away!'

These people are ancient history, man.

Of course in my case, the other giveaway is that the emails are coming to me via an address unknown to Linkedin.  I'm very lucky that in the most part the spammers haven't found my primary addresses (goodness knows why not).

According to the Cisco blog, this attack is extreme for both its ferocity and also for its focus on business users.

Read on for the impact of clicking on the "visit your inbox" link provided in the spam messages.