Clicked on a phishing link

mgfvvc

I was having an off day yesterday and clicked on a link in an obvious phishing message. It didn't load anything visible before I twigged and closed the window.

I have downloaded and run malwarebytes, which didn't find anything significant. Are there any other checks I should run?
This is on a Windows 10 laptop.

chrisw

The vast majority of phishing links are just that, trying to get you to enter your details. If you haven't, then you'll be fine.

Neil_Jones

mgfvvc said:

I was having an off day yesterday and clicked on a link in an obvious phishing message. It didn't load anything visible before I twigged and closed the window.

I have downloaded and run malwarebytes, which didn't find anything significant. Are there any other checks I should run?
This is on a Windows 10 laptop.

Burn your laptop.  Burn it to a pulp I say!

Seriously though, long as you haven't actually entered anything, then nothing to worry about.  You may get more of these sort of emails in a wave as they'll think "gullible punter here, let's try again!" but just ignore them.

facade

Was it definitely a link, or an attachment (like a word or pdf file)?

If it was a link, then if you have decent anti-virus and security enabled in your browser it should protect you from running scripts and going to pages that download malware.

If it was an attachment, these are usually malware in disguise and anything could have happened.

I found out this week about a way they disguise malware.

There is an invisible unicode character that reverses all the text after it, so they have a filename like

invoice #34(unicode  character)xcod.vbs

and it appears on-screen  as

invoice #34sbv.docx

Then they change the icon to a word file, email it out and wait to see how many people click 

mgfvvc

facade said:

Was it definitely a link, or an attachment (like a word or pdf file)?

It was definitely a link, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have downloaded something. There is no obvious indication that anything was downloaded.