We see lots of phishing attempts for email credentials. This one is slightly different than many others. It pretends to be a message from Email Support to Update Your Mailbox. Of course these don’t come from Microsoft or Live.com but are spoofed to appear to come from them.

They use email addresses and subjects that will scare, persuade or entice a user to read the email and follow the link. A very high proportion are being targeted at small and medium size businesses, with the hope of getting a better response than they do from consumers.

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:

From: Email Support <[email protected]>
Date: Mon 08/05/2021 02:58
Subject: E-mail Account Update

Body Content:

Update Your Mailbox
Dear [email protected],
Within 24 hours, if you do not update your mailbox, your email will be disabled. Failure to update your e-mail account, It will be permanently terminated.
Update Your MailBox
Copyright ©  E-mail Support Service. 2021

Screenshot:

Email Headers:

IP Hostname City Region Country Organisation
69.130.7.126  mail.addonusa.com US AS4181 TDS TELECOM
212.175.129.33  212.175.129.33.static.ttnet.com.tr Ankara Ankara TR AS9121 Turk Telekomunikasyon Anonim Sirketi

 

Received: from mail.addonusa.com ([69.130.7.126]:53623)
by knight.knighthosting.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 4.89)
(envelope-from <[email protected]>)
id 1d7Xv1-0006IL-AO
for [email protected]; Mon, 08 May 2017 02:57:03 +0100
Received: from live.com (unknown [212.175.129.33])
by mail.addonusa.com (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 322F3C4921F
for <[email protected]>; Sun,  7 May 2017 21:56:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Email Support <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: E-mail Account Update
Date: 08 May 2017 04:57:31 +0300
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset=”iso-8859-1″
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

If you follow the link inside the email  you see a webpage looking like this: ( where the email address the email was sent to is automatically inserted)
mailbox
After you input your password, you first get get told “checking details” then “incorrect details” and forwarded to an almost identical looking page where you can put it in again and each time it goes round the same saga.


Mailbox IV
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 straight forward 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.