Sony Style Warning needs a Warning?

Within the past month or so, I received a warning from Sony about fraudulent e-mails claiming to be from Sony but that actually were not. The deceptive e-mails were designed to lure Sony customers into divulging personal information at a fake Sony site. It “falsely indicates that it is from SonyStyle.com” and “includes a link to a bogus SonyStyle.com registration site”

So, I was shocked to notice that the e-mail from Sony that was supposedly warning about deceptive e-mails and URLs was itself guilty of using apparently deceptive or “fraudulent” URLs!

Within the text, it contained a couple of URLs that, in the HTML version of the e-mail, deceptively show up as www.sonystyle.com, but in fact pointed to some other site at m0.net. Here is one of the deceptive URLs from Sony:

https://news.sonystyle.m0.net/m/S.asp?HB9483736521X2571692X218821X

Not to mention that the From address of the e-mail was also from the same site: sonystyle@news.sonystyle.m0.net

Should you trust the warning e-mail? Sure. The contents are benign enough. Just think twice about clicking those links or replying to the e-mail! Sony is surely using a company to send out the mass e-mailings and to track the “click-through” responses, but that seems like a pretty poor choice in this context!