Month: April 2021

Work from home job scams are unfortunately very common right now with scammers trying to take advantage of people having financial difficulties due to the pandemic. If you receive an unsolicited email like this, do not reply with your email address, phone number or any other personal information. If you did, be extra vigilant about scams, phishing, smishing (SMS phishing) and vishing (voice phishing) since the scammers may view you as a promising target.

More on work from home job scams:

CBC News – Online job scams on the rise during pandemic year, fraud prevention expert says

CTV News – Better Business Bureau warning about these work-at-home scams

 

Various groups at UVic received this targeted phish. Note how the phisher used a spoofed sender to make the message look more legitimate. The URL that you can see in the phish message looks OK, but if you were to hover over those links you would find that they actually go to a phishing site on a completely different domain. This is why it is very important to hover over links to check the true destination before clicking on them.

While UVic does officially use and support Zoom, this email is not a genuine Zoom invitation. Note the sender email address–it is clearly not affiliated with UVic or Zoom. If you were to hover over the link, you would find that the URL does not go to either uvic.ca or zoom.us and therefore should not be clicked. If you did click it, contact your department’s IT support staff or the Computer Help Desk.

Phishers are well aware that people are using videoconferencing platforms like Zoom and Teams more and more because of the pandemic, so it is no surprise that they would try to take advantage by creating fake notifications. If you’re not sure if the meeting request is legitimate but it looks like it came a person or organization you recognize, contact them through a different communication channel that you know is safe to verify that it’s legitimate.

This was a spoof phish that tried to look like it came from noreply@uvic.ca. However, the sender was actually external and the link goes to a phishing site on Google’s Firebase platform, which is definitely not affiliated with UVic SharePoint or M365.

Purchase orders, invoices and receipts are very common lures for phishing and malspam campaigns. In this case, the vagueness of the message should be a red flag. When in doubt about emails like this, it’s best to err on the side of caution and not click on any links or attachments, which may direct you to phishing content or contain malware.

In this case, the PDF tries to make you believe that it has been secured in a way that means you have to login to view the content. In reality, clicking on “View On Adobe” will actually take you to a phishing site that pretends to be the Adobe login page.

This phish tries to use Microsoft branding and a sender display name that mentions UVic to try to look legitimate. As always, do not click on any links or attachments from messages like this.

If you were to hover over “increase storage” you would find it uses the ow.ly link shortener to hide its true destination, which should make you suspicious. The link ultimately takes you to a fake OWA login page designed to steal your login credentials.

This month, we became aware that several universities have been targeted by spearphishing emails with serious malware.  These emails use targeted language, come from compromised internal accounts, spoof (appear to be from) another internal account, and copy real email signatures. These tactics are used to make the emails look more legitimate. The emails include an .html or .dat attachment, which leads to an attempt to encrypt machines with Clop ransomware.

More information about these phishing emails, including example screenshots can be found here: https://www.hornetsecurity.com/en/security-information/clop-clop-ta505-html-malspam-analysis/, such as this example:

Please report phishing emails using the Report Phishing button or by emailing it as an attachment to the Computer Help Desk.