Tag Archives: malware email

YAPT: Yet Another Phishing Template

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Earlier this week, we gave you the touchdown task for July, which was to go phishing. In that post, we described a common scam email. I wanted to post an example, since some folks reached out on Twitter and asked about it. Here is a sample of the email I was discussing.

<paste>

Hi My name is Mrs. Hilda Abdul , widow to late Dr. Abdul A. Osman, former owner of Petroleum & Gas Company, here in Kuwait. I am 67 years old, suffering from long time Cancer of the breast.

From all indications my condition is really deteriorating and it’s quite obvious that I won’t live more than 3 months according to my doctors. This is because the cancer stage has gotten to a very bad stage.

I don’t want your pity but I need your trust. My late husband died early last year from Heart attack, and during the period of our marriage we couldn’t produce any child. My late husband was very wealthy and after his death, I inherited all his businesses and wealth .The doctor has advised me that I will not live for more than 3 months ,so I have now decided to spread all my wealth, to contribute mainly to the development of charity in Africa, America,

Asia and Europe .Am sorry if you are embarrassed by my mail. I found your e-mail address in the web directory, and I have decided to contact you, but if for any reason  you find this mail offensive, you can ignore it and please accept my apology. Before my late husband died he was major oil tycoon in Kuwait and (Eighteen Million Dollars)was deposited  in a Bank in cote d ivoire some years ago, that’s  all I have left now,

I need you to collect this funds and distribute it yourself to charity .so that when I die my soul can rest in peace. The funds will be entirely in hands and management. I hope God gives you the wisdom to touch very many lives that is my main concern. 20% of this money will be for your time and effort includin any expensese,while 80% goes to charity. You can get back to me via my private e-mail: (hilda.abdul@yahoo.com) God bless you.
1. Full name :
2. Current Address :
3. Telephone N° :
4. Occupation :
5. Age :
6. Country :

MRS. Hilda Abdul

<end paste>

As you can see, this is a common format of a phishing scam. In this case, you might want to edit the targeting mechanism a bit, so that they have to click through to a web page to answer or maybe even include a URL as supposed proof of the claim. That way you would have two ways to catch them, one by email reply and two by click through to the simple phish application.

As always your milage and paranoia may vary, but it is still pretty easy to get people to click or reply ~ even with age old spam phish attacks like this. What kind of return percentages did you get? What lessons did you learn? Drop us a line on Twitter (@lbhuston) and let us know. 

July’s Touchdown Task: Go Phish Yourself!

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This month’s touchdown task is to spend about an hour doing some phishing. Phish your user base, executives and other likely targets. Use the process as a basis for ongoing awareness and security training.

Phishing is a LOT easier and more effective than you might think. We’ve made it easy for you to do, with a free tool called MSI SimplePhish. You can learn exactly how to do it by clicking here.

Pay special attention to this step:

PreCursor: Obtain permission from your security management to perform these activities and to do phishing testing. Make sure your management team supports this testing BEFORE you engage in it.

You might need a couple more ideas for some phishing templates, so here are a couple of the most simple examples from real phishing going on right now:

1. Simply send a non-sensical subject line and the entire body of the message is the phishing url. You might encode this to make it more fun using something like a URL shortener.

2. Copy one of those spam messages that go around where the target inherits 40 million dollars from an oil company exec in the Congo or somewhere. Check your spam folder for examples. Replace the URLs with your phish site URL and click send.

3.  Send a simple music trivia question, which is common knowledge, and tell them to click on the target URL to answer. Make it appear to be from a local radio station and if they answer correctly, they win a prize (movie tickets, concert tickets, etc.)

As a bonus, simply do what many testing vendors do ~ open your gmail spam folder and pick and choose any of the spam templates collected there. Lots to pick from. 

The exercise should be fun, easy and likely effective. If you need any help, drop us a line or give us a call. Until next month, stay safe out there! 

Malware Emails

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There’s a couple malware emails making the rounds right now. One claims to be from the UPS, and the other said to come from CNN.com. The UPS email claims that they tried to deliver a package but the recipient address was wrong. The email contains an attachment invoice which it explains you need to print out and take it to their office. The CNN email contains a subject of “CNN.com Daily Top 10” and includes links that attempt to entice a user to click on them. If you follow the link, you’re redirected to a site and prompted to install an updated flash player. In both cases, of course, the executables are not what they say they are. Usually these emails are fairly easy to pick out due to grammatical and spelling errors. It’s also a good idea to not open any unexpected attachments, even if you believe they’re from a reputable source.