

I feel like Miss Mary on Romper Room looking through her magic mirror: I see a hacker in Brazil, and I see a hacker in Portugal, and I see a hacker in Mexico, and I see hackers in Czechoslovakia and Turkey and Thailand – and Virginia and Arizona too! Obviously I’m well-loved and popular. I flushed with pride when I looked because apparently I have friends all over the world that want to read my email. Take a look! You should at least see an entry for each time you’ve started Outlook or used webmail. Microsoft has a page called My Sign-Ins ( ) where you can see attempts to log into your Office 365 mailbox.

If you have an Office 365 mailbox, I want you to try something fun and educational. But there’s a chance you’ll slip at some point. (Shouting, red-faced, little bits of spittle flying): Think before you click, look before you type in your password! You can tell that it’s fake if you look at the address bar at the top, circled in the above screenshot, which is what you should do every single time before you type a password into anything. Links in phishing messages are likely to take you to a fake Microsoft sign-in screen. Why did you say Jack Robinson? Are you from the past? Seems odd. Those are all real things that happened to people I know in the last three weeks. If you make a single mistake, one moment of inattention, and type your Office 365 credentials into something that looks like a Microsoft sign-in screen but isn’t, criminals will be in your mailbox and before you can say Jack Robinson they will have sent poisoned emails to hundreds of your business contacts, or shut down your business with ransomware, or tried to divert payments from your customers to criminal bank accounts. If a bad guy gets into your mailbox, they can reset virtually all of your other passwords, in addition to the other damage they can cause to your business, your reputation, your mental health, your bank account, your faith in fellow human beings – you know, the usual hacker stuff.

And they’re obsessed with getting your mail password. Don’t preen like that, you’re not special – they’re after everybody.
