PSA: Beware of password phishing

PSA: Beware of password phishing

Example phishing message designed to steal your password.

Seemingly innocuous encrypted message notification.

Protect your passwords! This morning one of our clients was hit with one of the cleanest password phishing attempts I’ve seen in years. The message included their normal email signature and looked like an encrypted message.

In this case, we were certain at least one account was compromised.  We immediately reset passwords for all of their Google Apps accounts as well as blocked the URL used for all of our clients using our Managed Web Protection.

Securing Your Systems

TMPros approaches securing your users form outside threats from many angles, but we have three key components that impact the user experience:

  1. TMPros Managed Anti-Virus, based on Bit Defender, is a state of the art virus protection platform updated multiple times daily.
  2. TMPros Managed Web Protection monitors and controls the websites your computers can access.
  3. User education is key to preventing 0-day attacks.

Beyond this our product line includes the TMPros Network Security Appliance as a hardware firewall, our Patch Management Service, and 24×7 Monitoring.

What to Look For

Real Google Login

A real google login window shows a valid SSL certificate and accounts.google.com as a hostname.

  1. Always be aware of the login URLs for websites you access frequently.
  2. Always verify that the website has a valid SSL certificate before typing your password.

In Gmail’s case, the Google login should always start with “https://accounts.google.com/” with nothing else in the host portion of the URL.  The host portion of the URL is the part between the “//” slash-slash and first “/” slash.

https://login.microsoftonline.com

With Office 365, you should look for a valid SSL certificate and https://login.microsoftonline.com with nothing else in the URL bar.

 

What to Avoid

Malicious Phishing Attempt

This is an example of a malicious phishing attempt.

You can avoid most phishing attempts and viruses by following these five steps:

  1. Never type your password or personal information in a screen without https://
  2. Immediately close sites with host names you do not recognize.
  3. Never open attachments that weren’t requested by you.
  4. Ignore email senders you do not recognize.
  5. Immediately close any email that redirects you to a login page.
Power up your IT with TMPros!
Michael Hull
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