Mailbox exceeded limit phish

Mailbox exceeded limit phish

Today is the last day of 2014, but there has been no letup in the volume of phishing emails, although it does appear that there has been a temporary lull in the gift voucher scam emails. We have however stopped another type of phishing email, this time targeting users of Google+.

The email is as shown in Figure A. This particular type of email is very similar to other emails in the past that have targeted AOL users. Outlook users have also been targeted in previous campaigns. The only change with the latest campaign is that the criminals are targeting Google+ users.

The subject line of the email is “Email Storage Warning (Final Notice)!!!” which is a fairly eye catching subject line. The criminals are attempting some social engineering by making the recipient think they need to perform an action urgently. The sender of the email is listed as “Email Administrator”.

A graphic contained within the email “shows” the user that their mailbox is almost full. The email goes on to provide a link that will enable the user to reduce the size of their mailbox. The bottom of the email has a fairly standard type of statement informing the user that they can change which email address Google+ uses. This is to lend authenticity to the email.

In reality, the email sender is not from Google+. None of the three links lead back to Google or to Google+. This email is a phishing email; we suspect it is aimed at extracting people’s personal information, such as credit card details.

Whilst this email is targeting Google+ users at present, be aware that it has been used in the past to target users of other online email services, such as AOL and Outlook. The wording in the other cases is very similar.

If you do receive this email, do not click on the links. Delete the email immediately.

Scott Reeves
MailShark
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