Week in review 9 January 2015

Tax refund phishing emails and two more bank phishing emails were the order of the week. As before, we provide links to the articles, which themselves contain screenshots of the phishing email, together with a description of the subject line and the sender of the emails.

Latest phishing email mimics Westpac

The first item up is a phishing email mimicking Westpac, and using the urgent sounding subject line “Westpac – Balance exceeded!” as enticement for the recipient to act. This phishing email is another in a long string of spam stopped by our filters this festive season. It does have the rare distinction of being the first bank phishing email in 2015.

New Year brings new phishing campaigns

The New Year certainly brought a mix of old and new phishing campaigns. The second cab off the rank (so to speak) is an email claiming to be from ANZ bank. This email took a slightly different tack form the usual urgent sounding phishing emails that implore the recipient to “do something”. Rather, this email blandly informs the user they have a new internet banking message, and supplies a link to enable the user to open the message. Of course, the link does not lead back to the ANZ. At the time of writing it led to a phishing site, though the actual domain name may have changed.

Australian Taxation Office refund phishing scam

Tax refunds are almost always welcome news; as they say only two things in life are certain: death and taxes. These days maybe we should expand that to include “Taxation phishing emails”, because there are a few of these in circulation at present. The latest email is something of a re-hash of an older email that surface in early 2014. It informs the user they are eligible for a refund, but they have to supply numerous [personal details first. Personal details that are “required” include credit card numbers. Once again, the site linked to in the email is a phishing site. If you receive any of the emails mentioned this week, delete them. They are phishing emails.

Scott Reeves
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