Bland phishing email urges confirmation
Phishing emails fall into a few categories. There are sophisticated ones, blatant false ones, and all the rest. Today’s email is in the final category, though only just. It is a bland affair, and trots out the line that your account has had password failures on different computers. As a consequence, please click on the link and confirm all your details.
The email urges you to do this by 30th April 2015. The penalty for not complying is account suspension. ANZ bank customers are the target (although we have seen phishing emails re-used for other banks). Don’t fall for it; this is a fake email.
We have posted the email as Figure A. It’s a nondescript effort. No ANZ branding or logos. There is a copyright notice at the foot of the email. There is also a notice telling the recipient to not reply to the email. The subject line for the email is ”ANZ Alert”. The sender of the email is “ANZ Internet Banking”. Checking the actual email domain used shows that it is not from the ANZ.
There is a solitary link in the email. As you can see, the anchor text uses an actual ANZ URL. This is a trick often used by criminals to lend credibility of a phishing email. The email uses a semi-personal greeting. It does use the email address of the recipient. Close, but no cigar.
It’s a dire email in many ways. But it’s all fine; this is a phishing email. There are a few signs, not least of which is the absence of ANZ branding. There are more: the email is not personalized (as noted above). There are a few errors in wording, and a typo. As also noted above, the email domain is not an ANZ domain. Finally, the link in the email might look genuine, but it isn’t. It leads to a malicious site. The site attempts to steal user credentials. For the record, here is the ANZ Internet Banking.
Scott Reeves
MailShark
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