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Passwords at risk for users who fall for voicemail phishing emails

Security researchers are warning of a new wave of phishing emails which are using an unusual disguise in their attempt to both bypass scanners at email gateways and dupe unsuspecting users.

The attack arrives in users’ inboxes in the form of an email purporting to be a notification about a voice message using subject lines such as “PBX Message,” “Voice:Message” or “Voice Delivery Report.”

The attackers are banking on recipients’ curiosity to find out who they might have missed a voice message from and what it might contain.

Attached to the email is… an email in the form of a .EML attachment.

As researchers at EdgeWave point out, although many users are very comfortable with the idea of forwarding an email, they may be much less familiar with the notion that emails can actually be sent as an .EML attachment and then opened by email clients.

Furthermore, says Edgewave, it’s quite possible that many companies have put measures in place to block dangerous attachment types but not taken such steps against .EML files because… well, they’re email!

If you were to click on the attached .EML file it will be opened by your email client and display an email message that pretends to come from RingCentral, a cloud-based platform for business phone system.

In an attempt to trick the targeted user into believing that they have received a delivery notification about a voicemail, the emails list bogus information about the call including the time it was made, how long it lasted, the caller’s country code and a partially redacted caller’s number.

To make the message more convincing still, it appears as a preview within Outlook rather than as content in a separate window.

The criminals who launched the campaign are hoping that all this will be enough (Read more...)