Hackers Are Pretending To be Chipotle In Poisoned Emails
Chipotle recently reported that an account used by their company’s marketing department had been hacked, with the hackers controlling it issuing an active campaign to leverage the account.
The hackers are sending out phishing emails containing poisoned links. A recipient clicking on these links will be directed to a malicious website designed to prompt users for a wide range of personal information so the hackers can harvest it.
Leveraging legitimate compromised email accounts is the preferred route for hackers. Statistics show that only 2-3 percent of phishing emails sent from spoofed accounts are effective in luring recipients to click links. Hacking a legitimate email account and using it for the same purpose more than doubles the likelihood that a recipient will click embedded links and/or download attached files.
Most of the hackers are launching these types of campaigns such as the Chipotle hackers. Where they will send emails pretending to be a Microsoft Team Member and usually are associated with Office 365.
The poisoned links included in such messages point back to a dummy Microsoft login page controlled by the hackers. Anything a recipient enters on this page will be harvested by the hackers and used against those who fell, victim.
The email security company Inky reported that the Chipotle email address in question had been used to send more than a hundred tightly targeted phishing emails over a three-day period. A spokesman for Inky observed that almost everyone has a Microsoft login and a significant portion of internet users use the same password across multiple websites. Hacking the Microsoft login is the option of choice for most hackers.
Chipotle has since regained control over that account but the threat remains. Given the sheer number of corporate email addresses in use today it is all too easy for one of them to become compromised and put thousands of people at risk.
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