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Email Threats Highlights: Chase Phish, LinkedIn, American Express Open and Verizon Wireless Spam

25
Jan
2013

In this week’s Email Threats roundup, we are highlighting spam and phishing campaigns that have made a comeback, such as LinkedIn and Chase spam, but take advantage of different social engineering lures this time around.

  • You Know It’s Awkward When.you receive an email notification that claims to originate from LinkedIn, saying you have an event invitation from one of your employees; however, (1) you don’t own a company and (2) you don’t have people under you that you can call “employees.” Furthermore, isn’t LinkedIn Events the latest thing-of-the-past?

    click to enlarge

    Better steer clear from this spam if you don’t want your system to be prodded by exploits.

    Details of this email can be found here.

  • “Deb Walden” Gives Chase to User Information.

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    Online banking clients, be warned: a spam campaign using the names of Chase Bank and its EVP is in the wild. It advises you, the recipient, to verify your online account via an attached file due to “multiple error attempts to access your account online.” For details about this mail, refer here.

    Now before rushing to open the attachment so you can quickly regain full access of your account, first of all, please calm down. Receiving a spam like this is no real indication of any attempt to breach your account, especially if the email lacks any markings of legitimacy from its company of origin. Also, never open nor attempt to share the attached file as it calls back to a phishing site.

  • Fake Transaction, Fake Termination. It appears that, out of nowhere, American Express OPEN has aborted a transaction you don’t remember carrying out. The purported email then advises you to check out the detailed version of the notice to find out how this termination occurred.

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    The detailed notice, however, and all the links on the message body, lead only to a page where a Blackhole Exploit Kit is hosted. If your system is found to be vulnerable, do expect to be alerted by your AV of an attempted Cridex infection. That is, of course, if you have an updated AV installed.

    Spam details here.

  • This Fake Verizon Mail Looks the Part but Fails to Deliver.

    click to enlarge

    For one thing, the text in the message body where it’s supposed to communicate the purpose of why the email was sent doesn’t make much sense. Confirmation for what? I should visit my Verizon account page because.?

    What matters here is that recipients should not click any of the malicious links in the message body as they lead to serious system infections.

    More about this campaign here.

The GFI Labs Team

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