New Type of Phishing Attachment Proves No Attachments are Sacred

As if there aren’t enough phishing scams to watch for, there is another one targeting customers of several well-known banks and users of money transfer services. In an email that appears to have been sent by one of the following organizations, an attachment in an email requests users to open it to “verify” accounts, otherwise they will stay frozen.

The organizations used include, Chase Bank, Capital One, and Wells Fargo for online banking and PayPal and Venmo. The email claims that user accounts are frozen because “security alerts” were triggered and the user needs to verify the account to release it. There is an attachment that brings up the phishing page where personal information is requested.

This type of trick has been seen numerous times before. In fact, one targeting PayPal users was going around very recently. However, in most cases the attachments in the email messages that appear are disguised as PDF, EXE, or DOC. This one, however, is an HTML file, proving that, as Jim Stickley of Stickley on Security says, “Literally no type of attachment is guaranteed safe to open these days.”

The obvious message is never click attachments in email, particularly if they are unexpected or come from unknown senders. Always make sure they are not infected with some type of malware before opening. If you cannot be 100% sure, don’t do it.

If you need to verify your account details, log into your accounts directly by going to a previously bookmarked link or by typing in the address you know is the correct and safe one. If all looks well when you do that, you know for certain the email message was trying to phish you and you can pat yourself on the back for not falling victim to it.

The cloud security company that found this scam, Cyren said that this one is particularly common right now. It increased 50% over February in only the first half of March.

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