08/02/2021
I have violated someone’s copyright, according to an email I received this morning. And apparently I did it by publishing my own photos on my website.
Someone used the “contact me” link on my site to tell me that I was hosting photos that were their copyrighted images (see below). You can imagine my surprise! Especially since every photo on my site, down to the photo of me on the “About” page, was taken by yours truly.
It didn’t take long to Google a phrase used in the email and find that this is a scam that has been going around recently. It’s been written about in several places. I even found around 40 attempts - basically copy-pasted versions of what I received - in one location, the contact page of a farm in the Hudson Valley of New York.
The link, of course, attempts to install ransomware if you click and launch it.
If you receive an email like this, don’t click the link, obviously. My site is hosted by Squarespace, so I forwarded it to their security team. As it came from an internal link, and not an outside email address, it may be harder for them to do much about it. The wannabe hackers are using our site’s own features against us.
So this one is on us, as creatives and small business owners who may receive something like this. It’s up to us to be responsible our own IT and security work.
But at least I knew from the moment I read it that the email was fake. All photos on my site are mine. For people who are using photos they did not create, and for which they do not have a license from the copyright holder, it’s one more way they’re exposing themselves to trouble, be it legal (receipt of a legitimate notice of copyright violation) or extralegal (they know they lifted photos from the internet, and out of fear that such a message is legit they click a link and install ransomware on their machine or network).
So beware of scams. And while you’re at it, make sure you license all the photos you use.
