Before anyone launches themselves into the sky: the title is clickbait. This is about phishing attempts that use ICE to persuade you to click. Sendgrid the company is not emailing about supporting ICE. But technically Sendgrid the infrastructure is.
Author here. I quickly thought of the title for the article and shipped it. I agree it's clickbait-y and apologize to SendGrid (and any confused readers) but yes, as you say it's _technically_ correct in a very narrow sense – SendGrid's infrastructure and users are sending these emails, it's just that they're fraudulently associated with SendGrid the company.
In any case, I revised the title to "SendGrid isn’t emailing you about ICE or BLM. It’s a phishing attack."
Maybe someone can edit the title of the submission on HN accordingly?
I think HN should embrace AI to the point of having an alternative AI-generated title next to the original title, to reduce clickbait and reduce the global rage index.
This is an interesting idea, I think clickbait titles are one of many problems with our engagement-based social media tools today. For the sake of experimentation and transparency, here's the suggested titles from ChatGPT 4. They seem to be more descriptive and accurate overall.
---
Possible alternative titles that better match the article’s content:
How Phishers Are Using SendGrid to Target SendGrid Users with Political Bait
– Accurately reflects the mechanism (SendGrid abuse), the audience, and the novel political/social-engineering angle.
SendGrid Account Takeovers Are Fueling a Sophisticated Phishing Ecosystem
– More technical / HN-native framing, avoids culture-war implications.
Phishception: Politically Targeted Phishing Sent Through Compromised SendGrid Accounts
– Highlights the core insight and the self-reinforcing nature of the attack.
I've been thinking about building a browser extension that turns clickbait headlines into factual titles.
"Why is SendGrid emailing me about supporting ICE?" becomes "Phishing Campaign Targets SendGrid Users via Compromised Accounts and Politically Charged Bait"
I think it would be more time than I'd like to commit though.
I tried to vibe code it about a year ago(a firefox extension), worked surprisingly good. Basically for a small set of web sites I frequent, just rewrite titles or remove links all together if a title is a click-bait or ragebait.
There is a chance that the title here was intentionally worded to answer a question people are likely to search for, then actually answer their concerns.
HN would never do that, it would violate the minimalism of the site.
Most people aren't even aware that their posted URLs can be changed or their titles re-edited automatically because the UI doesn't give affordances for anything. You're just expected to notice and edit it out within the edit window (which there also isn't an affordance for.)
I don't like LLMs much, though I also don't really care much either, and I don't trust any models to get the content nuance right. But I'd still welcome it if it helps a little between the tons of clickbait or just straight up incorrect or sensationalist titles.
Maybe one day our knee jerk reactionary outrage will be quelled not by any enlightenment but because we are forced to grow weary of falling prey to phishing attacks.
I'd feel pretty stupid getting worked up about something only to realize that getting worked up about it was used against me.
I'm writing this because for a moment I did get worked up and then had the slow realization it was a phishing attack, slightly before the article got to the point.
Anyways, I think the clickbait is kindof appropriate here because it rather poignantly captures what is going on.
I agree. It can demonstrate the knee-jerk affect in real time for the reader. Someone who reacts strongly to the title of this thread would have experienced a similar reaction if they had received the SendGrid phish email. Never seen clickbait wording actually be appropriate before.
The effectiveness of these techniques will die off over time as young people are increasingly inoculated against them in the same way our generations are generally immune to traditional advertising. The memetics filters get better over time as us geezers are replaced by new models.
The title is genius; it uses the same psychological trick as the phishers are, to point out to us how vulnerable we are. Obviously, for you to know the title is clickbait, you'd've had to click through and read it, which is the exact social engineering vulnerability the author is trying to demonstrate being exploited.
I thank the author for getting me this way, as I would have likely fallen for the unsubscribe trick.
That is the expectation but no way to enforce it of course.
What happens a lot, at least for me, is that people will start reading the comments to see if they want to bother reading the link. Then they might start commenting on what's already been said. It's easy to slip into that pattern.
Though you also frequently see top-level comments that appear to be based on the headline alone.
Most people on Hacker News don't bother to read the linked article and either comment based on their impression of the title or whatever random thing happens to be on their mind at the time. Most people who do bother to read the linked article stop as soon as they encounter javascript or formatting or too much whitespace or a minor logical, spelling or grammatical error and then that will likely become the subject of the entire thread.
The number of people who actually read the entire article and then attempt to comment in good faith are few and far between.
right, so on the topic of "phishing emails designed to elicit enough emotion that you forget to consider the button might be a phish", the headline itself of this blog post is doing the exact same thing, really. The headline should be, "Phishing scams launched through SendGrid exploit deep political sentiments to achieve success" or something like that.
but that would be clear and very boring. nobody would read your blog then. A headline that very obviously implies Sendgrid the company supports ICE, and so much so that they are emailing all their customers about it, clicks galore. Well done.
Confusingly, they claim to have read the comment they replied to, and still managed to screw it up. Which I guess is also emblematic of today's discourse. Reading is not enough, there has to be comprehension.
