ISPR News: Beware of increasingly convincing phishing attempts

A short but important notice to all ISPR Presence News subscribers:

This week two long-time members of the International Society for Presence Research contacted me to ask and alert me about email messages they’d received that were apparently from me but that they correctly suspected were phishing attempts. In addition to reminding all of us to be suspicious of such messages and to contact the apparent sender separately through a verified channel to confirm any requests, especially when they involve financial transactions, it’s disturbing to note that these requests seem to be getting increasingly convincing. And from a presence perspective, it’s not clear whether the apparent improvement in these messages is caused by scammers learning how to compose more convincing attempts at social engineering or just taking advantage of the rapidly improving abilities of artificial intelligence to mimic humans. In any case, we all need to stay alert to the threat.

–Matthew (President, ISPR)