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This article is from Trend Micro.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that we post a lot about phishing scams. And there are good reasons for this: they’re everywhere, a lot of people fall for them, and they can be potentially devastating.
This week we’ve observed three phishing scams that have been spreading all over the US. Keep on reading to learn about them, as well as how to avoid them.
Scammers have been impersonating Microsoft’s popular cloud storage service, OneDrive. They’ve been sending out bogus emails to people informing them that there is an “urgent security update”.
Although the content of the email is somewhat confusing — it seems the scammers may have got OneDrive mixed up with Microsoft’s email service, Outlook — the message’s goal is to get people to click on the blue “Log In” button.
Once clicked on, the button leads to a malware-infected website.
If a victim were to click on the red button, malware would be downloaded onto their computer.
Malware will commonly be designed to steal personal data and passwords, delete files, and render computers inoperable, among other malicious things.
Fidelity Investments, commonly known as Fidelity, is a financial services company based out of Boston. Scammers have been impersonating this company to try to steal people’s personal and financial information.
The malicious email above, which they’ve been sending to massive amounts of potential victims, claims there is a new security upgrade and all Fidelity customers need to re-validate their account information. Of course, this is complete nonsense.
All the scammers want is for victims to click on the “Validate Your Account” link. If they do so, they’ll be taken to a phishing website. Any and all personal and financial information entered onto the site will be sent directly to the scammers, which they could then use to commit any number of other crimes.
Rather than impersonating a specific company, in this scam, the scammers have taken a more generic approach.
Via text message, potential victims are told that their user account is in danger of being closed. It’s not true of course, the scammers just want them to click on the link embedded in the message. Two examples of these malicious messages are below.
The victims are led to believe that their device is infected with malware. They’re instructed to click on the “Fix now!” button. However, all information on this page is a complete lie, and if they click on the button, instead of fixing their device, it will in fact infect it with malware.
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Source: pexels.com
