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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Fake Voicemail Messages Tricking People Into Opening Malicious Content

Office 365 has been the target of an increasing number of ongoing phishing scams.

The latest scam involves using fake voicemail messages to convince targets that they need to log in to hear the full recording.

Researchers at McAfee Labs had this to say about the matter:

“Over the past few weeks McAfee Labs has been observing a new phishing campaign using a fake voicemail message to lure victims into entering their Office 365 email credentials.  At first, we believed that only one phishing kit was being used to harvest the user’s credentials.  However, during our investigation, we found three different malicious kits and evidence of several high-profile companies being targeted.”

Recipients will receive an email message informing them that they missed a call.  A partial recording is available andembedded in the email, but the recipient gets little more than hello, so there’s no real indication of what the message might be about.

Then, if the recipient clicks the link provided to “log in and hear the message” they will, of course, be sent to a page that looks like an Office 365 login screen.  All they’re really doing at that point is handing their credentials over to whomever sent the message.

As we said at the start, Office 365 has become an increasingly popular target.  There’s another scam making the rounds that tries to get a user’s login credentials by making it seem as though the message was sent by the recipient’s employer’s HR department and talks about an upcoming raise.

Both are powerful approaches that have been yielding better results than usual for the scammers.  Be sure your IT staff and all of your employees are aware of and on their guard against these scams.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Researchers Recently Discovered A New Mysterious Malware Strain

Researchers at the cybersecurity firm Anomali have discovered a completely new type of malware that’s disturbing on several levels.

Worse is the fact that the researchers aren’t quite sure what it does.

The new strain has been dubbed ‘IPStorm’ by its creators, who at this point, remain unknown.

Of interest is the fact that it is the first malware found in the wild that makes use of the IPFS P2P network for its command and control communication.  By doing so, it can hide its network activity amid legitimate streams of P2P network traffic, making it virtually undetectable. IPFS is an open source P2P file sharing network used to store and share files.  Among other things, it’s currently being used to host a version of Wikipedia that can be accessed in countries where access to the website proper is blocked.

The malware has been written in the Go programming language, but researchers haven’t been able to ascertain at this point how it begins its initial infection cycle.  They have discovered that the malware package itself has been split into a number of parts, which is an indication that the group responsible for its initial development knows what they’re doing.

The researchers added: “By breaking functionality out into different Go packages, the codebase is easier to maintain.  Also, the threat actor can break out things into modules to make it easier to swap out or reuse functionality.”

On top of that, IPStorm comes with a number of antivirus-evasion techniques built-in. When it copies itself onto a target system, it uses folder names that relate to Microsoft or Adobe systems, making it unlikely that even a savvy, observant user would notice it right away.

The researchers estimate that right now, the IPStorm botnet consists of some 3,000 machines, which is a surprisingly small number and a clear indication that the malware is in a very early stage of development.  Keep this one on your radar.  It’s not a big threat at the moment, but it certainly has the potential to be a major problem in the months ahead.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Right Clicking In Gmail Will Unveil Its New Features

When is a right click more than just a right click?  When Google reveals its latest changes to Gmail, of course!

The tech giant has recently announced that they’re going to be overhauling Gmail’s right click menu options. This will enhance its value by adding more and better functionality, with an eye toward improving the overall user experience.

The current right click menu offers the following functionality:

  • Move to Tab
  • Archive
  • Mark as Read
  • Delete

The coming changes will expand to include:

  • Search options
  • Reply and Forward functionality
  • Snooze
  • Mark as Unread
  • Movement Options
  • Labeling
  • The option to open an email in a new tab

You won’t have to take any action to gain the benefits of these new features.  The pending update will make them available to all Gmail users automatically.

In terms of a time frame, Rapid Release domains will begin receiving the update on February 11th 2019 although it can take up to fifteen days for the new features to become visible. The roll-out to the general public is slated for February 22nd, although it could be up to three days before the new menu options become visible to all users.

These are fantastic additions and we can hardly wait to start using them.  Odds are excellent that Google’s recent changes will have ripple effects that extend far beyond Gmail, too.  The reality is that menu functions tend to get taken for granted.  At this point, they’re so well established and entrenched that most people don’t even consider the possibility of tweaking them to improve overall functionality.

That’s unfortunate, but given the coming changes, the hope is that it will prompt other email providers and software vendors in general to go back to the drawing board and reassess their time-honored menu options to see what other improvements can be realized.

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