Apparently, word of the industry’s predicament is spreading quickly, and so small-time, pimply-faced scammers, who go by names like Courtney Nierengarten, Victor Johnson, or Jennifer Hang and adorn themselves with titles such as “Board Executive Search Partner” or “Executive Recruiter”, get the idea to go fishing for a bit. In an email that appears to have been tweaked with AI to produce reasonably conversational business English, they offer their assistance with the next step up into the world of executive-level positions.
With a personalized email, the content of which was scraped from websites and a LinkedIn profile, they’re clearly trying to give the impression that they’ve conducted extensive background research on the potential candidate. Then they top off all this drivel with a few ego-boosting compliments … and the phishing email is ready to go. To be honest … I can’t decide what’s more disturbing: the breathtaking incompetence of these scammers, or their apparent confidence that the average security professional is even more incompetent..
Two fundamental principles are now facing off and battling each other in my mind: On the one hand, the principle of mental plausibility (people tend to attribute significance or feasibility to an idea simply because it exists in their minds or because someone has already invested energy in it), and on the other hand, the circular reasoning principle (in the sense that there must be “something to it,” because it was tried).
But ultimately, we don’t need to delve that deeply into cognitive science. In the end, the explanation is probably much more trivial: The scammers’ effort is calibrated to the anticipated perception threshold of their potential victims. This makes one thing abundantly clear: We’re getting dumber and dumber and have evidently lost all capacity for critical thinking.
