Science & Tech

This is what you need to do to protect yourself from the Google Docs scam

Picture:
Picture:
Erik Khalitov / iStock

If you receive an email from someone asking you to open a Google Doc - don't open it.

A new phishing scam is going around. It will look like you've got an email - probably from someone you know - that will be inviting you to open a Google Doc link.

If you click on the "Open in Docs" link, it will send an email to your entire inbox.

And it's very sophisticated.

Speaking to Business Insider, a Google spokesperson said

We have taken action to protect users against an email impersonating Google Docs, and have disabled offending accounts,

We’ve removed the fake pages, pushed updates through Safe Browsing , and our abuse team is working to prevent this kind of spoofing from happening again. We encourage users to  report phishing emails in Gmail

Google are also keeping up to do info about the scam, and what they're doing to fix it, here.

It's unclear how the attack was started, but reporters at CNN, Buzzfeed, Business Insider and Motherboard all tweeted saying they'd received the email.

It's thought that the original came from a 'mailinator' email address, Time reports. Mailinator are disposable email addresses that let users access emails on the site without having to sign up for an account.

If in doubt follow director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Eva Galperin's advice.

She told CNN that anyone who clicked on the link should check their Google App permissions and remove the one called “Google Docs.” You can do that by clicking this link.

More: Google's new artificial intelligence can’t understand these sentences. Can you?

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