• by Jess Nelson , July 1, 2017

HBO’s television series Silicon Valley wrapped up its fourth season finale on Sunday, but that hasn’t stopped hackers from leveraging the TV show’s popularity in phishing attempts.

Named after the Bay Area’s technology headquarters, Silicon Valley is a story about a group of young tech professionals launching a startup. The startup is called Pied Piper, and often finds itself in competition against the larger Google-like company Hooli. 

Pied Piper and Hooli are fictional organizations developed by the creators of Silicon Valley, but they do have real domain names and working websites that HBO has created for marketing purposes. ValiMail has stopped more than 5,000 phishing scams attempting to use Hooli.com and PiedPiper.com domain names over the past month, according to the email security company. 

“After all, who could resist an offer from Gavin Belson (gavin.belson@hooli.com) for free tickets to Hoolicon?” writes Peter Goldstein, CTO and co-founder of ValiMail, in a blog post. “Or a free e-book on the 'Conjoined Triangles of Success' from 'Action' Jack Barker (action.jack@hooli.xyz)? Wouldn’t you click on a link or sign up for an account, if only to see what happens next?”

Founded in 2015 and based in San Francisco, ValiMail is an email management and security company that helps authenticate legitimate email and stop phishing attempts. HBO is a client of ValiMail, and the latter company was able to stop every illegitimate email sent by cybercriminals using Silicon Valley domain names.  

This should be a lesson to any marketer that suggests creating a new Web site for a marketing initiative -- even fake company domain names can be abused by cybercriminals.