We see lots of phishing attempts for email credentials. This one is slightly different from many others. It pretends to be a message from Alibaba to log in & view a company order. It is quite an amateurish looking attempt but it will catch out the unwary.

I have received over a dozen of these in the last few minutes. They use email addresses and subjects that will entice a user to read the email and open the attachment. A very high proportion are being targeted at small and medium-sized businesses, with the hope of getting a better response than they do from consumers.

These do not come from Alibaba and are coming from what appears to be either a compromised or fraudulently set up account on an Australian server

You can now submit suspicious sites, emails and files via our Submissions system

Remember many email clients, especially on a mobile phone or tablet, only show the Name in the From: and not the bit in <domain.com >. That is why these scams and phishes work so well.

The email looks like this:
From: Alibaba.com <[email protected]>
Date: Fri 16/02/2022 09:27
Subject: Alibaba.com/Contact MOQ
Body content:
Alibaba.com: Company Order

Dear
You Have (2) Important Alibaba.com Companies Quotation.
Login via our SSL secured website, To view sample orders from companies interested in buying your product
View Sample Order
Privacy Policy – Terms of Use
Copyright © 1999-2017 Alibaba.com. All rights reserved.
All Rights Reserved.
________________________________________
This message is auto-generated from the E-mail security server, and replies sent to this email can not be delivered.
This email is meant for XXXXX

If you follow the link in the email you go to a compromised/hacked site

After you insert an email address & password, you get redirected to another login page http://webmail.speedy.com.pk/ which might be connected or might be another innocent victim that has been chosen at random who just happens to use a Roundcube login page.

We all get very blasé about phishing and think we know so much that we will never fall for a phishing attempt. Don’t assume that all attempts are obvious. Watch for any site that invites you to enter ANY personal or financial information. It might be an email that says “you have won a prize” or “sign up to this website for discounts, prizes and special offers”

Please read our How to protect yourselves page for simple, sensible advice on how to avoid being infected by this sort of socially engineered malware.

All of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email.
Whether it is a message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” and it appears to come from a friend or is more targeted at somebody who regularly is likely to receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day. Or whether it is a straightforward attempt, like this one, to steal your personal, bank, credit card or email and social networking log in details.

Be very careful when unzipping them and make sure you have “show known file extensions enabled“, And then look carefully at the unzipped file. If it says. EXE then it is a problem and should not be run or opened.