MailGuard Blog

If you have been summoned by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to appear in court via an email today, you may have received a hoax notice. Having brandjacked AFP, cybercriminals are sending emails informing recipients that they are guilty of a law violation.

Early Tuesday (AEST), MailGuard commenced blocking a new scam email disguised as a fake Office 365 notification, that links to a phishing site. 

Microsoft’s stature as a trusted household name makes them a lucrative brandjacking target for cybercriminals.

This latest phishing attack - shown in the screenshot above - uses the “Office 365” trademark to persuade recipients that the email is legitimate and get them to click on the “recover messages” link.

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.”

A new phishing scam has been detected by MailGuard, exploiting the trademarks of Microsoft Office 365 and Xerox.

This criminal intent email attack takes the form of a plain text message purporting to be a Xerox document sharing notification. 

In the early hours of this morning a new email phishing scam emerged, impersonating Microsoft Office 365. 

The attack consists of a deceptively simple HTML email message, telling the recipient that their email account is over quota and that they need to upgrade their plan.

New phishing and malware attacks today targeting Office 365, Xero and DropBox users have emphasised a growing trend of brand exploitation.

MailGuard customers can be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. Over the past week, several media outlets have reported on a ransomware attack targeting millions of Microsoft Office 365 users.

This month, an Office 365 outage meant that many of Microsoft’s European customers were unable to log into their email accounts or access related services.

If you’ve recently migrated to Office 365, you may have experienced periods when your email was either unavailable, or performing slower than required.

If you’ve made the move to Office 365 as your hosted email solution, your email is likely to be filtered using its Exchange Online Protection (EOP), which works to intercept and remove malicious content before it reaches your inbox.

The features and benefits of Office 365 are undeniable, allowing business owners and employees to access email and data from anywhere in the world via the cloud.

However, organisations transferring their operations to the cloud face a number of security implications - in particular, data access and defence against cyber threats like spam and malware.

Fortunately Office 365 features a range of security benefits, shown below, which help to mitigate risk.

There’s little doubt that Microsoft’s Office 365 services have completely changed the way companies have looked at cloud services. Although others, like Google, offered cloud productivity like office applications and email first, it’s Office 365 that has turned interest in the cloud into deploying in the cloud.