Goodbye, 2020 - 12/30/2020

On today's Quick News Daily, we'll be talking about the Brexit deal from last week, a pretty crappy move by GoDaddy.com, and the latest news on the fiasco with the stimulus deal in Congress.

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Sources:

• GoDaddy Employees Were Told They Were Getting a Holiday Bonus. It Was Actually a Phishing Test.
• Twitter Thread on GoDaddy Phishing
• Trump Signs Coronavirus Relief And Spending Bill
• Details Of Coronavirus Relief Bill: Direct Payments, Unemployment
• New Year's Eve from the CDC
• Panic! At The Disco - Roaring 20s (Official Audio)

"Roaring 20s" by Panic! at the Disco is the property of the band, their record label, distribution companies, and any of the other original owners. You can download the full "Pray for the Wicked" album here: https://patd.lnk.to/PrayForTheWickedID or listen to it on YouTube using the link above in the Sources list.

Mostly Accurate Transcript:

OPEN

Today is Tuesday, December 29th; welcome once again. Today, we have some stories that I wanted to get to yesterday, but the show was already running a bit over 20 minutes, so I figured I'd just save them until today. So, we'll be talking about the Brexit deal from last week, a pretty crappy move by GoDaddy.com, and some news on the fiasco with the stimulus deal in Congress. Let's keep right on rolling this week and get caught up.

GO DADDY

Let's start by talking about this horrible, tone-deaf initiative that happened to employees of GoDaddy.

About two weeks ago, GoDaddy employees got an email from the email address "[email protected]". The email read:

"2020 has been a record year for GoDaddy, thanks to you! Though we cannot celebrate together during our annual Holiday Party, we want to show our appreciation and share a $650 one-time Holiday bonus! To ensure that you receive your one-time bonus in time for the Holidays, please select your location and fill in the details by Friday, December 18th.”

So, about 500 GoDaddy employees filled in their information and sent it back. A ton of folks are struggling through this pandemic, so this $650 would really mean a lot to them. Well, sadly, this wasn't real. A couple of days later, they got another email from GoDaddy's chief security officer, Demetrius Comes, that said:

“You’re getting this email because you failed our recent phishing test. You will need to retake the Security Awareness Social Engineering training.”

As I mention quite frequently, I'm in school for IT, so I've learned quite a bit about how to keep information safe on the internet and phishing scams and all of that. Honestly, unless there was some type of warning a couple of weeks before this, I think I probably would have filled this out too. I think the only things that would be suspicious would be that they're asking you for your information, and that the email was from "happy holiday @godaddy.com", not "happy holidays". I haven't learned this yet in school, but frankly, if they have "@godaddy.com" in their email address, that would probably mean that the hackers already got into the GoDaddy system. At that point, they'd already have almost everything that they wanted, and the company would have a lot bigger worries than employees giving information.

The emails were brought to the world's attention because three employees decided to forward them to The Copper Courier, who first broke the story.

That story also says, "Despite the company surpassing 20 million customers this year and reporting 'record customer growth', the company laid off or reassigned hundreds of employees during the coronavirus pandemic, including in Arizona, Iowa, and Texas." That always drives me up the wall when companies say that they're having such a great year, but as an employee, you look around and half your department ...