Warning for fake Google Adword emails

As always popular and good services will be targetted by evil spirits trying to make a few bucks of innocent people 🙁 . This is of course sad, but the best we can do is to warn as many as possible when we see these kinds of fake emails.

Yesterday I got thre emails that looked like they came from Google, but they didn’t. The emails tried to trick me to download some weird software to “upgrade my browser” to the “latest SSL protection certificate”. This is of course fake, since Google would never send out an email like this and an upgrade of this kind of software would be handled by your web browser. As far as I know they don’t upgrade the SSL standard that often and if they do they do it in sucha good time that you would upgrade your web browser at least 2-3 times before you actually would need the new version 😀

This is one of the emails I got:

Attention GOOGLE ADWORDS Customers!

For certain services, such as our advertising programs, we request 128-bit SSL security information which we maintain in encrypted form on secure servers.
We take appropriate security measures to protect against unauthorized access to our unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of data.
Please download latest SSL protection certificate

Read more>>

Unprotected browsers will not be able to Log in after September 24, 2008
Sincerely, Chuck Sykes.

2008 Google Adwords, Developing new services.

The link started with http://adwords.google.select.starter.signup…………. so if you only had a quick look at it you would be fooled to think it would lead you to Google.

As you can see from the screen shot I took the page look just like a real Google page 🙁 so it would fool almost anyone. Notice both the login form and the “Download now” button.