This email may have duped Clinton's campaign chairman into giving out his password

Oh, John Podesta.
 By 
Colin Daileda
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Oh, John Podesta. To think you could have kept your email correspondence private if you had simply wondered why a Google account had sent you an email from a "googlemail.com" address.

Emails from the Clinton campaign chairman have been slowly released to the world by Wikileaks in the lead-up to the presidential election, providing fodder for news stories at all kinds of outlets.

Those emails may well have been accessed through a simple phishing email. And although we don't know whether this is the email that led to the hack of Podesta's account, it seems like it very well could be.


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A couple of fishy (phishy?) things about the email should probably have set off alarms for Podesta and the rest of Clinton's team.

First off, "googlemail," the account from which this phishing email was sent, is not a thing.

Second, any email with the subject line "someone has your password" should trigger all sorts of bells and whistles.

In Podesta's defense, though, a member of the Clinton campaign's help desk sent an email noting the phishing email was a "legitimate" email. In the email, the IT worker provided a Google link so Podesta could change his email account information safely. It also noted Podesta should turn on two-factor authentication.

Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

It is possible whoever read the email, still clicked on the original phishing link in the email chain below. If Podesta's information was entered into the phishing address, it was game over.

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Colin Daileda

Colin is Mashable's US & World Reporter. He previously interned at Foreign Policy magazine and The American Prospect. Colin is a graduate from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. When he's not at Mashable, you can most likely find him eating or playing some kind of sport.

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