We all receive spam, and occasionally we see and skip a suspicious email, but what if it comes from a trusted colleague?

This morning I received an email from a reader of NerdWords. It was short and sweet — way too short and sweet — and my alert system kicked in. It also had a suspicious attachment that presented itself as a Word doc, but it just didn’t look safe.

Because this contact was not someone I do business with every day, I recognized it as a phishing attempt. But I decided to call the sender to investigate. She agreed to an interview to share what happened on her end. Please watch, even though the video quality is awful.

Investigating further, I discovered several warnings on the web regarding a trojan horse that was spread through a macro in a Microsoft Word document. It’s going around.

I don’t want this to happen to you, so I consulted with fellow nerd Phil Gerbyshak. He’s brilliant. I know this video is much longer than I usually post, but please, please, please take a few minutes to watch it and share it. This is important stuff, people.

Oh, and then I asked Phil a follow-up question about when we feel guilty about trusting an email. This one is only 101 seconds.