Confirm account phishing email begins

Confirm account phishing email begins

“Confirm your account !” is how the latest phishing email (targeting Apple users) begins. It seems that criminals never grow tired of targeting Apple users, and in many cases, non-Apple users.  This week we’ve stopped a large number of Apple phishing emails, designed to steal the recipient’s personal information. Today’s email is a confirm account type phishing email.

We have reproduced a copy of the email in question in Figure A. The subject line of the email reads “Your Account Apple Has Been Disabled Please Check Your Information.”  The sender of the email is listed as “Apple”.  A single apple logo is present in the top right hand corner. The bottom of the email has a fairly standard looking imprimatur.

The email begins with the heading “Confirm your account !”  This appears before the salutation. The salutation is “Dear Member”. The reason given for the email is that Apple need to confirm billing details. According to the email, the recipient’s account will be closed within 24 hours if the information is not updated.

Contained within the body of the email is a single link. There are no other links in the email. The sole link is to (ostensibly) allow the user to update their details. In terms of phishing, this is a moderately complex email.

There are some giveaways that this is not a genuine email from Apple. Probably the most notable one is a spelling error, combined with some grammatical errors. The salutation is not personalised; Apple always personalise their emails. Finally, mousing over the link shows that it does not lead back to Apple. The site linked to is a phishing site.

This particular email is a fake. Apple has posted some guidelines on identifying fake emails. As mentioned earlier, there have been a number of these emails stopped by our email filters in the last few days, all of them with same theme. If you do receive this email, delete it.

Scott Reeves
MailShark
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