This Halifax phishing attempt starts with an email saying Your Account pretending to come from Halifax <[email protected]> is one of the latest phish attempts to steal your Bank, credit card and personal details.

This one only wants your personal details,and your credit card and bank details. Many of them are also designed to specifically steal your email, facebook and other social network log in details as well.

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 looks like this It will NEVER be a genuine email from Halifax or any other bank or company so don’t ever click the link in the email. If you do it will lead you to a website that looks at first glance like the genuine bank website but you can clearly see in the address bar, that it is fake. Some versions of this phish will ask you fill in the html ( webpage) form that comes attached to the email.

The phishers have chosen a quite effective url to pretend to be Halifax and a user in a hurry might not look too closely http://halifax-co-uk-validate.usa.cc/

Dear Halifax
Customer,
Suspicious activity was detected on your account from an unrecognized device. As a safety precaution, we are sending you this email to inform you that we have restricted access to domestic and international transfers for your
Online Banking account until you verify your identity with us.Your security is essential to us. Verifying your identity with Halifax is easy To verify, visit Personal Internet Banking by CLICKING HERE. Enter all required details for us to authenticate your identity. After which,your account would be restored and restriction removed. Please check your online statements regularly by logging on to Personal Internet Banking and contact us if you have any concerns. You can change your statement preferences through Personal Internet Banking. Thank you for choosing this service.

Yours sincerely
Bruno Genovese
Head of
Personal Banking
Halifax Bank

© Halifax Bank plc 2021. All rights reserved. Important Notes Privacy Statement

Please do not reply to this email – use the contact points on the Halifax Bank web site to contact us. http://www.halifax.co.uk

Get safe online
Halifax
Bank plc Registered Office: 8 Canada Square, London E14 5HQ. Registered in
England – Number 14259.Authorised by the Prudential Regulation
Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the
Prudential Regulation Authority.
Halifax phish emailThis one is more unusual than others, because the phishing attempt only works when you are using Google chrome browser and that is set as your default browser. If you click the link in Firefox or Internet Explorer you automatically get forwarded to the genuine Halifax bank website.

If you follow the link in the email when you use Chrome, you see a webpage just saying data: in URL bar looking like this:

Halifax fake site

When you fill in your user name and password you get a page looking like this, where the phishers try to validate your details to make sure that you are entering “genuine ” information. They make sure that the bank account numbers have the correct number of digits and that the credit card numbers have the correct number of digits and format. Pressing submit sends you to the genuine Halifax website

When you fill in your user name and password you get a page looking like this, where the phishers try to validate your details to make sure that you are entering “genuine ” information. They make sure that the bank account numbers have the correct number of digits and that the credit card numbers have the correct number of digits and format.

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.