A cruel new phishing scam arrives in your mailbox reminding you of an "emergency" company zoom meeting that starts in a few minutes. Why should you attend? Because the email states that you may be fired.

Researchers at Abnormal Security discovered the ruse and shared a sample email message purporting to come from your employer, calling itself an "Offer Letter Review Meeting."

"Your attendance at this meeting is essential and is equally necessary to initiate this Q1 Performance Review meeting," the body of the email reads. The purpose of the meeting is this: "Contract Suspension/Termination Trial."

Yes, we would click on that in a heartbeat. As it happens, there is a handy text link in the body of the email that says: "Join this live meeting." That link looks like a Zoom login page, but it is actually a perfect fake with a different URL than the real one in "https://zoom.us/signin".

When you enter your Zoom credentials, your credentials become the credentials of the bad guys, and they will not only use your Zoom account, but also the same They will have full access to your Zoom account as well as any other account using the same username and password. (Logging in to this page will not give you access to Zoom, and as Abnormal Security points out, you might enter your credentials a second time thinking there was an error.

Abnormal Security discovered this scam campaign using Microsoft's Office 365 email service, but in reality it could happen on almost any email platform.

The easiest way to avoid falling for such phishing scams is to avoid clicking on links in emails and to verify the link by hovering the mouse pointer over the link to view the URL before clicking.

But the urgency of this phishing email is designed to make you forget such safeguards. I confess that I was fooled by a similar phishing e-mail a few years ago. The only saving grace was that I happened to have the best anti-virus program installed, which blocked my browser from displaying the phishing page.