Security News > 2022 > April > Phishing goes KISS: Don’t let plain and simple messages catch you out!
That's not so much because you'd stand out as a scammer, but simply that your email would advertise itself as "Clearly does not belong here", or as "Obviously sent to the wrong person", and we'd ignore it even if you were a legitimate business.
If we were a smaller company, and we'd outsourced our IT and email services, this sort of message might not so obviously be out of place.
These crooks have used the simple and effective trick of creating a clickable link in which the text of the link itself looks like a URL, as though it was your email software than automatically converted a plain-text-only URL unto a clickable item.
Of course, the email isn't plain text; it's HTML, so that the offending link is actually encoded like this.
What to do? Don't click "Helpful" links in emails or other messages.
Crooks rarely send just one phishing email to one employee, and they rarely give up if their first attempt fails.