Latest Phishing Emails Target Microsoft 365 Users
- October 16, 2024
- Bradley Taylor
It takes a pretty good phishing email for us to take a second look at it. Most phishing emails are very obviously scams to the trained eye. Today we want to share a warning about a new wave of phishing emails aimed at Microsoft 365 users. This is the premium email service provided by Microsoft.
The overly-priced email service has 280 million users to date. This makes phishing emails targeting users of this product unusually successful because of the huge target audience. Many of our clients use Microsoft 365 as do we. So, when these emails started coming in we gave them a second look.
Firstly, the email design and layout is simple and to the point. It uses a Microsoft logo at the top and looks legitimate aesthetically. If you hover your mouse over the only hyperlink in the email you will see that it actually points to Microsoft’s website. It’s a nice little touch added to fool people.
But the purpose of this phishing email is not to get you to click anything. This is a call-in scam. The phone number in the email (815) 599-3338, is a toll free number and after doing a little Googling I found a message board where someone had called it. They said that a person with an Indian accent answered which motivated the caller to hang up right away. However, as you already know, just about every major corporation has outsourced at least part of their call center responsibilities to India. So this is proof of nothing.
If you Google the phone number you will see a page from Microsoft that they published 7 days ago. The page announces that the emails are scam emails and should be deleted right away. Here is that page
Oh, I almost forgot to mention… the return address of the email points to [email protected]. This email address looks convincing enough but it is fake. It is another fine detail the scammers used to trick folks.
A screen shot of the email:
