There is a reason I send out regular security bulletins explicitly warning about malicious email activity and instructing you, my clients, to call me before you do anything that could have serious repercussions. That is because there is really bad stuff out there!
I received a voice mail from a client saying she received an email from her accountant and it contained instructions for using Dropbox. (Dropbox is a file hosting service that offers cloud storage and file synchronization.) When I listened to the recording, I wasn’t sure if she couldn’t follow the instructions or if she couldn’t get Dropbox to open. Needless to say, she sent the email to her son, and he couldn’t get it to work either.
Then she called her accountant, who told her he didn’t send it, but that other clients also received the email. After all of that, she ended her message asking me if her computer was OK.
Well, that was a tough question to answer. Just the same I was able to conduct some forensics into what occurred with this email – and it was most certainly malicious.
Here is the text of the problematic email (unfortunately I couldn’t capture the header information).
Now, I don’t know how many times I have told you not to click on links from people you don’t know, but that wasn’t the case here. This sender (whose name has been erased) is known to the recipient. However, I strongly doubt that any business person she knows uses arbitrary capitalization like this. I also doubt a professional would ever send an invoice labeled as a “doc” file with a “jpg” file type.
Read More →
