Good news! I’m getting a salary increase!

Oh darn, no I’m not…

There’s great news for me in my inbox today.

Wages email

It seems my boss here at “Grahamcluley” has decided that I deserve a wage increase. This is not only terrific news for my bank balance, but also terribly exciting as I never knew I even had a boss – let alone that my company had a human resources department and accounts team.

The email has the subject line “New salary increase”, and I’m told the new bump up in wages starts this month.

I just hope no rotter is trying to pull the wool over my eyes to click on a link that might have malicious intent.

Of course, I could always hover my mouse over the link to see where it’s going to go before I…. oh… oh dear.

Wages email link

Oh well. I guess I would be wisest to report this attempt to scam me to my IT support team. Which, unfortunately in this company of one person, is just me.

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In all seriousness, you might be rightly suspicious of emails like this and never dream of clicking on the link, but can you say the same for everyone else inside your company?

Simple social engineering tricks like this can often be the starting point of a much more serious security incident.


Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and is the co-host of the popular "The AI Fix" and "Smashing Security" podcasts. Follow him on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, or drop him an email.

3 comments on “Good news! I’m getting a salary increase!”

  1. Gary Thomas

    Of course ideally your company would have someone in IT who knows all about IT security and you could then report this to them :-)

  2. Spryte

    Aw Shucks !! How unfortunate this seems to a fishing letter trying to get you to click on a suspicious link
    You do such great work you do deserve a raise.

  3. Chiny

    Other suspicious signs are the dodgy spelling, dodgy grammar and other wackiness that defies classification. Hard to imagine who would click on such an email.

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