The digital world has evolved and developed beyond the scope of a layman to understand all of its intricacies and the problems that have been posed by those that possess an understanding of the tidbits of the internet. The people using this information and knowledge that they possess for malicious intent and purposes are commonly referred to as scammers and frauds utilizing phishing, pharming, and other methods of viruses and illegal software and accesses to fool the layman into a false sense of security and progressing forward with identity theft, financial fraud and at times even committing felonies on the names and resources that are being attacked on.
The most recent form of scamming attempt that the scammers have used revolves around the ability for them to sneak up and look at the email by sending one themselves. The forged fake email looks very similar to the original email that would be sent by Microsoft themselves, therefore only a keen eye can highlight the mistakes there exists with grammar, fonts, and the little details that would get the scammers to lose their hand. To protect the users from such phishing attacks, Microsoft had in place the Natural Language Processing System to counter the threats, however, the scammers have found a way around it by using the Cascading Style Sheets by implementing them on the fonts of text that surpass the system in place to avoid it and allowing for users to believe that the email is a legitimate request having them lose their valuables, precious contacts, emails and many more in the process with the further fact that everyone in their address book can be contacted and most of them could be hunted down in a chain text contact making the grand scale and scheme to be greater and more threatening than it initially seems to call for losses anywhere between hundred to millions of dollars.
To avoid for such extreme losses and disruptions, the users of business emails must be very careful while reading emails from new sources, plus actively learning phishing knowledge is also imperative, and most importantly is to contact the IT department/admin if there is something not called ahead by the department and still reached by the company as a little mistake of assumption can crash the entire company’s database. Even though Microsoft is probably working to cancel this threat as well, It is better to take a safe foot and be safe rather than regret the loss. Better late than never.
H/T: Avanan
Read next: CloudFlare, Google and Microsoft Among Most Spam Ridden ISPs
The most recent form of scamming attempt that the scammers have used revolves around the ability for them to sneak up and look at the email by sending one themselves. The forged fake email looks very similar to the original email that would be sent by Microsoft themselves, therefore only a keen eye can highlight the mistakes there exists with grammar, fonts, and the little details that would get the scammers to lose their hand. To protect the users from such phishing attacks, Microsoft had in place the Natural Language Processing System to counter the threats, however, the scammers have found a way around it by using the Cascading Style Sheets by implementing them on the fonts of text that surpass the system in place to avoid it and allowing for users to believe that the email is a legitimate request having them lose their valuables, precious contacts, emails and many more in the process with the further fact that everyone in their address book can be contacted and most of them could be hunted down in a chain text contact making the grand scale and scheme to be greater and more threatening than it initially seems to call for losses anywhere between hundred to millions of dollars.
To avoid for such extreme losses and disruptions, the users of business emails must be very careful while reading emails from new sources, plus actively learning phishing knowledge is also imperative, and most importantly is to contact the IT department/admin if there is something not called ahead by the department and still reached by the company as a little mistake of assumption can crash the entire company’s database. Even though Microsoft is probably working to cancel this threat as well, It is better to take a safe foot and be safe rather than regret the loss. Better late than never.
H/T: Avanan
Read next: CloudFlare, Google and Microsoft Among Most Spam Ridden ISPs