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or seem to be coming from Google or maybe a politician or the like.
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And very often those emails are encouraging you to click a link
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and maybe make a donation, click a link, maybe change your password,
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click a link, and verify your information.
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Phishing is all about trying to use social engineering,
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in this case in a technical way, to try to convince you
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through very convincing looking emails and even websites that it
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is a legitimate email from paypal.com or it
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is a legitimate email from a politician or it is a legitimate email
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or request from a teacher here at Harvard.
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But it's not.
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What they're trying to do, the adversaries in this case,
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are prey on your trust for those certain companies or persons.
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They're trying to prey on your comfort with familiar user interfaces, things
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that you've seen before.
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But unfortunately, it's all too easy for an adversary
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to make a very official-looking email, to make a very legitimate-looking
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website, even one that looks identical to paypal.com,
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identical to Gmail or other services.
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And frankly, if you take some of CS50's other courses,
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it kind of boils down to copy and paste in the simplest of scenarios,
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just copying and pasting some legitimate website
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and pretending that you own it too.
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So how might phishing manifest itself in the real world?
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Well, consider one of those social media posts
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online that tend to invite you to comment with your favorite song
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from childhood.
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Sometimes those posts have a million responses
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from people you know and don't even know.
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But more than being interested in what your childhood favorite song was,
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those posts are very often phishing for personal information
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because suppose that you, or at least someone among those comments
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is actually using their favorite childhood song as their answer
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to some website or app secret question.
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Now the author of that post, not to mention everyone else,
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knows the answer to the same.
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So how else might phishing manifest itself in the real world?
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If you were to visit a screen later today that
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looks a little something like this, well, this
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looks like Gmail's login page, at least here in the US when using English.
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And frankly, I've seen this so many times
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that I might be inclined to just blindly type into the form
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my email address and then after that probably my password.
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But it's important to begin to develop an intuition or a suspicion
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for when and when these sites might not be legitimate.
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How might you do that?
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Well, you should minimally be looking at the URL bar
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and making sure that it is gmail.com or probably google.com
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or whatever google dot country code, depending
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on where you live in the world, making sure that it looks legitimate
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and that you've actually been there before for.
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When you hover over links, you can very commonly in your browser
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look at the bottom, left-hand corner or some corner of your screen.
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And you can see what URL a link will actually take you to.
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Even though the words on the screen might say something,
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the actual link might take you somewhere else.
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Now, even then, it's hard sometimes to discern these kinds of things.
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But these are just best practices.
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You don't need to be so worried that you don't go anywhere on the internet.
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But you should learn to keep an eye out for these kinds of things.
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And in general, with phishing, rather than trust any link in an email
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that you receive, especially when it's something
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private like a bank account, something medical, something personal,
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well, that's fine.
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Open a new tab and manually go to paypal.com,
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Enter, or manually go to gmail.com, Enter.
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Don't just blindly trust these links.
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Now, here again, we see a trade off between usability and security.
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It's a little annoying if I can't just click on a link
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and go to the place I want to go.
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You have to manually open the page, type it in manually, and so forth.
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But again, it depends on what's now more important to you,
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the usability of that service or the security of your account therein.
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This is even more worrisome when it comes to two-step verification.
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And Google takes some liberties with the wording here.
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This is usually best described as two-factor authentication.
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But again, the most sophisticated of adversaries,
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theoretically, if they sent you a phishing email,
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tricked you into a visiting a website that looks like Gmail but is not Gmail.
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They could theoretically even prompt you for a two-factor code like this.
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And then if they're smart and savvy enough with code,
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they could automatically now send your username, your password,
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and a two-factor code maybe to the real gmail.com, log into your account,
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change your password before you even get up and running therein.
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It's a more sophisticated threat, and it's not something
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you need to worry about as much.
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But it's this principle of not just trusting screens and requests that
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are presented in front of you.
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You should have this healthy skepticism and at least some technical savvy
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to know how you can decide for yourself, yes, I
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am comfortable with proceeding with this step.
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Now, there's another type of attack, too, that's more sophisticated
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and not one you need to worry about as frequently as some of the earlier ones.
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But they're generally known as a machine-in-the-middle attack.
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Whereby, if you're on the internet, there are, suffice it to say,
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many other machines on the internet, very often, between you and whatever
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website or app you're visiting.
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Often those machines might be things like routers,
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servers that internet service providers companies, universities,
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maybe even your own home owns and controls.
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