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Let Us Help You Make Your Online Banking With HSBC More Secure- Phishing

Phishing Scam

An email saying Let us help you make your online banking with HSBC more secure is one of today’s phishing attempts

There are a few major common subjects in a phishing attempt. The majority are either PayPal or your Bank or Credit Card, with a message saying some thing like :

  • There have been unauthorised or suspicious attempts to log in to your account, please verify
  • Your account has exceeded its limit and needs to be verified
  • Your account will be suspended !
  • You have received a secure message from < your bank>
  • We are unable to verify your account information
  • Update Personal Information
  • Urgent Account Review Notification
  • We recently noticed one or more attempts to log in to your PayPal account  from a foreign IP address
  • Confirmation of Order

The original email looks like this. It will NEVER be a genuine email from  PayPal or Your Bank so don’t ever fill in the html ( webpage) form that comes attached to the email. Some versions of this phish will have a link to a website that looks at first glance like the genuine bank website. That is also false.

 

HSBC
Important news about Telephone Banking.
Customer Services: 03457 404 404*3
Dear Valued Customer,
We got in touch recently to let you know that our Online Banking is evolving. So we’re pleased to
announce that our latest Online and Telephone Banking improvements are ready for you to start
enjoying , We urge you to visit our website to switch to our One Time Password (OTP) for your
Telephone banking. you will be asked to verify your security details so you can start using unique
passowrd for each time you use our Telephone Banking services.
The OTP can be genereated using either the NEW digital Secure key or your physical Secure key.
– Security without the physical Secure Key
– Easy, convenient access wherever you are
– One Time Password (OTP) for HSBC Telephone Banking
Switch now >

 

If you have any questions, or want to know more, please take a look at our FAQs.
Yours sincerelyRaman Bhatia

Head of Digital Banking
  Your security is our priority
In our emails, HSBC will never ask you to reply with confidential information or to confirm your security details. Please forward any suspicious emails to phishing@hsbc.comFor further information please visit our Security Centre.
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© HSBC Bank plc 2015. 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.*3 Our lines are open 8am–10pm every day (except for Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day). If you’re calling from abroad the number you need is +44 1226 261 010. If you have a speech or hearing impairment, you can call our textphone service on 0345 712 5563. To help us improve our service, and in the interests of security, we may monitor and/or record your call.

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We maintain strict security standards and procedures to prevent unauthorised access to information about you. HSBC will never contact you by email or otherwise to ask you to validate personal information such as your user ID, password, or account numbers. If you receive such a request, please call our Online security on 0845 600 2290.

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This email is confidential. It may also be legally privileged. If you are not the addressee you may not copy, forward, disclose or use any part of it. If you have received this message in error, please delete it and all copies from your system and notify the sender immediately by return email. Internet communications cannot be guaranteed to be timely, secure, error or virus free. The sender does not accept liability for any errors or omissions. Please do not reply to this email. Should you wish to get in touch, please visit Contact us.

The link in the email directs you to a fake site, if you look at the fake website, you would be very hard-pressed to tell the difference from the fake one and the genuine site. The only way is look at the address bar and in the Genuine bank site , when using Internet Explorer the entire address bar is in green. ( in Chrome or Firefox, only the padlock symbol on the left of the browser is green)

luckily the phishing site has been deactivated by the webhosts, but be careful and remember that banks don’t send emails saying follow the link to change anything

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 or click the link in 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.