MailGuard Blog

MailGuard has intercepted a phishing email warning users that their Office 365 registration needs to be verified within 48 hours, or else risk having their account suspended.  With millions of businesses and individuals using (Microsoft) Office 365 globally for their daily tasks and communications, it is highly likely that a lack of vigilance will result in cybercriminals stealing credentials for later criminal use, such as identity theft, BEC, sold on the dark web and more.  

Outlook Web App users must take care and double-check any emails advising that your password has expired - it’s more than likely a phishing attempt by cybercriminals to steal login credentials.  

DocuSign seems to be winning the popularity contest amongst cybercriminals as MailGuard intercepts a second phishing scam imitating the global electronic agreement provider in just a matter of days. The scam emails appear to come from a compromised account belonging to a U.S. immigration law firm, as recipients are presented with an email purporting to be from the Accounts Department notifying the victim of an ‘EFT confirmation’ in .pdf format. Other trusted names such as Office 365, Gmail and AOL have been impersonated in the process.  

MailGuard has intercepted a phishing email scam masquerading as a file-sharing notification in order to trick users.

Brandjacking - where cybercriminals impersonate the brands we trust, in order to fool us into clicking on malicious content - has affected some of the world’s biggest companies, past and present. 

Anyone can be a target of brandjacking scams.

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.

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.”

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.