Security conference invitation identified as potential phishing message

I received an invitation to a conference on several topics in ICT security, to be held in Gjøvik in May. The invitation was marked by Outlook as „might be a phishing message and is potentially unsafe“. I will guess what happened.

  1. The list of recipients was suppressed. Good for confidentiality if you do not want everybody to know who is invited.
  2. The email contained a link to a web page, and the host part of the URL consisted of a numerical IP address, not a server name. Usually, we do not encourage users to click on links that they cannot evaluate where they lead to.
  3. Two attachments were blocked, a DOC file and a PDF file. Unless they were positively identified as malicious, this might be the consequence of the message being identified as a potential phishing email.

Too bad I cannot read the conference program… This incident could be a good anecdote to open the conference or to address the dinner guests.

About Author: Hanno Langweg

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