MailGuard Blog

MailGuard has intercepted a fraudulent email purporting to be from LinkedIn, a popular e-networking tool used by millions of professionals worldwide. This is a phishing email designed to harvest the confidential data of LinkedIn users for malicious intent, such as committing identity theft.

Cybersecurity was a significant catalyst in facilitating productive remote work and ensuring business continuity in 2020. 

Commenting on paradigm shifts in cybersecurity in 2020, Ann Johnson, Corporate Vice President, SCI Business Development at Microsoft wrote: 

“As we look past the pandemic to a time when workforces and budgets rebound, Zero Trust will become the biggest area of investment for cybersecurity. This means, that right now, every one of us is on a Zero Trust journey—whether we know it, or not.” 

In the final weeks of 2020, news of the SolarWinds hack broke – a cyber-attack that has been dubbed as “the Pearl Harbor of American IT”.   

This week marks Identity Theft Awareness Week, a public awareness campaign by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) dedicated to mitigating the impact of identity theft. The week comprises a series of events organized by the FTC and its partners that focus on reducing the risk of identity theft and on concrete steps to recover if identity theft occurs.

ANZ Banking Group is the subject of an email phishing scam being blocked by the MailGuard team this morning, which is designed to steal the Internet Banking credentials of recipients. 

• Phishing
• Brandjacking
• CEO fraud

All these kinds of cybercrime are perpetrated using email as their primary vector.

Every business is constantly sending and receiving emails, it’s part of the background noise of everyday work, so it’s a powerful tool for criminals who want to slip under the wire and attack a company from the inside out.

MailGuard has identified a new scam using a fake Office 365 notification email that links to a phishing site; see screenshot above. The scam is designed to steal your Office 365 login credentials.

Recipients of the scam email are informed that their "office email" will be deactivated, and instructed to click on a link in the message to “cancel deactivation.”

Friday afternoon at a typical office in Sydney, Australia. Most of the staff have left to start their weekends when a junior accountant sees an email appear in her inbox. She hesitates for a moment but then she notices that it’s from the company’s CEO.

‘Are you still in the office?’ the message reads. ‘Sorry to keep you back on a Friday night, but this is urgent: I need you to make a wire transfer for me immediately in the amount of $45,000 to my broker in London.

MailGuard have identified and successfully blocked an email phishing attack targeting Commonwealth Bank customers.