What has the Irish language got to do with cyber security?

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Cyber criminals will try anything to fool us into clicking a link.

A recent email was just the latest example.

The email was designed to look like it came from Ireland’s postal service, An Post.

And it was written in Irish.

Luckily, Irish was my weakest subject in school*, so I can’t even understand what it was trying to tell me.

But even though I didn’t know what the button labelled ‘Athsheachadadh’ meant, I knew not to click it.

So what?

Two things:

1 – It’s a reminder that cyber criminals will try anything to fool you into clicking a link.

2 – If, like me, you had little interest in learning Irish at school, you can now say it was just because you were mindful of the threat that the Irish language posed to your cyber security!

* I was studying Irish for over 12 years before I realised that “Dún na nGall” translates to “Donegal”. Up to that point, I thought it was just some sort of imaginary land that every depressed Irish writer mentioned in their fictional stories.