PPC Marketers Take Note: China-based Domain Phishing for Google Adwords Accounts
I got this email over the weekend which looks like a genuine email from the Google Adwords team, mentioning that you need to authenticate your account because it’s been disabled/suspended.
Just about any PPC marketer will be concerned if they get an email like this because AdWords downtime could translate into a significant of profits.
Before you jump to the page and entering your account information, I checked that the HTML email was going to a *.cn (China-based) domain, so it would be pretty unwise to enter your username or your password.
Mozilla Firefox had earlier been patched with a “phishing site” notification, similarly Internet Explorer showed a similar warning when I tried to access the site.
Just take note of the destination URLs in your emails before clicking on them, also if needed view the message headers and you can usually spot their point of origination (unlikely that the Adwords team would be sending notification emails out of Africa or Russia).
There was also a port about this at KezNews.