Here’s the latest example of a fake Microsoft email that slips past their anti-virus and security checks to end up in a Microsoft 365 mailbox.
It might look like a real email at first glance but it’s not. The big clue to us was “Office 365” which is a name Microsoft rarely uses these days (it’s Microsoft 365).
Other clues that it’s a fake:
- From in the message header doesn’t match ‘From:’ in the body of the email.
- The message header ‘From’ name and address is totally unknown.
- Received date in the message is nine days before the message was sent.
- The email address in the message body doesn’t match the To: address in the header.
- The attachment is a .html file but the email body says it’s a PDF.
We didn’t open or preview the .html attachment because we’re not complete idiots!
The only strange thing is that the message managed to get past Microsoft’s security checks.
We marked the email as ‘Junk’. Hopefully other people did the same and similar emails are now being blocked.
The lesson is to ALWAYS be on guard for a nasty email. Modern cloud based email scans are good but will never be perfect.
