Are you an accountant looking for an opportunity to work from home? Be careful, you may be a victim of a phishing scam. That according to the South Carolina Association of CPAs. From the association’s website, “A job hiring scam that advertises a fraudulent work from home accountant opportunity tricks jobseekers into laundering money, warns John LaCour, the founder of Charleston-based cybersecurity firm PhishLabs.”
British Gas Scam
British Gas customers were told they’re eligible for a refund. Of course they weren’t, it was just a phishing scam. According to BrownGlock, “The email was in fact a scam designed to get people to hand over their personal and financial details, but you wouldn’t be able to tell at first glance. The scammers paid close attention to detail, phrasing the correspondence convincingly and even using the same font, logo and imagery as genuine British Gas communications.”
“It’s not clear how the scammers got hold of these email addresses, many of them did not have a proper email security service. Perhaps they breached British Gas’s systems or simply dumped the email on as many people as possible, hoping that some of them had accounts with the provider. If this was the case, it was a calculated move. British Gas has 12 million customers, which is just under half of all UK households.”
Outlook Hotmail Termination Scam
Welcome to the world of the “Outlook Hotmail Termination Notification” phishing scam. Does anyone even use Hotmail anymore? Apparent enough do to craft a phishing attack.
“Outlook or Hotmail users have received ‘Outlook Hotmail Termination Notification’ emails which claim that their request to delete their accounts has been approved. Of course this is a phishing scam. The fake email messages are being sent by cybercriminals to steal Hotmail usernames and passwords, by tricking Hotmail users into visiting a phishing website that steals email account credentials.” Hotmail? Really?
Body Count
It wouldn’t be another week if we didn’t have another data breach at a hospital. This week’s victims brought to you by Gary, Indiana-based Methodist Hospitals. It was “discovered an unauthorized individual had gained access to the email account of one of its employees following the detection of suspicious activity in the employee’s email account.”
An investigator was brought in and “determined that a breach had occurred and patient information had been compromised.” How many accounts? 68,000.
Tu Ora Compass Health Breach
Just so you don’t think it’s only American healthcare providers that get taken, “The medical and personal information of about 1 million people was exposed after a breach of Tū Ora Compass Health, a primary health organization (PHO) located in New Zealand,” according to SC Magazine.
“The non-governmental organization (NGO) discovered four intrusions – by what Ministry of Health Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said were two hacktivists and two more sophisticated actors.”
Student at Columbia University Scam
Phishing attacks don’t just hit big enterprises who are in a position to deal with the ramifications. They sometimes hit the little guy without phishing protection solution. Such was the case this week when a student at Columbia University was scammed by an email phishing attack.
According to the Columbia Chronicle, “A Columbia student lost $2,000 after falling victim to one of several alleged dog walking job scams circulating among the school’s Outlook accounts. The student said the interaction started when he received an email from a colum.edu account asking if anyone wanted to walk dogs for an aunt.” If you can’t trust someone who needs their dog walked, who can you trust?
And that’s the week that was.