We are seeing a lot of phishing attempts against Microsoft office and outlook accounts. This one starts with an email with the subject Microsoft account security info verification pretending to come from Microsoft <[email protected]>

One of the major common subjects in this sort of phishing attempt is Your password will expire soon or update your email or something very similar.

This one wants only wants your email / Microsoft account log in details.

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, log in 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.

The original email says:

Upgrade your Webmail account

To protect your account, As at 2016 We have reach agreement with Microsoft Office, you can now check your email and send and receive via Office365.

Upgrade now to secure your email click the link below :

Upgrade Now.

Thanks for using Microsoft

Any Help? Contact customer-support. Don’t reply to this email. It was automatically generated.

The link behind the Upgrade Now is If you are unwise enough to follow the link you see a webpage looking like:

Which is a very good imitation of a genuine Microsoft 365 log on page.

If you do fill in the email and password, you immediately get sent to the genuine Office 365 log on page and you just think that you might have entered the email or password incorrectly and do it again

All of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to follow links or 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 following links or unzipping attachments 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.