Office 365 phishing now with fake SharePoint alerts

Employees using Microsoft Office 365 are targeted in a phishing campaign that makes use automated SharePoint notifications to steal their accounts.

The phishing emails delivered as part of this phishing campaign are addressed to all employees working at targeted organizations and have until now reached an estimated number of up to 50,000 mailboxes based on stats from email security company Abnormal Security.

What makes these phishing messages potentially dangerous is the fact that they’re using a shotgun approach, trying to trick at least one employee and then use their credentials to further compromise their employer’s systems.

Fake SharePoint alerts used as lures
The attackers behind this phishing campaign did their best to keep the phishing messages as short and vague as possible, and they also made it a point to include the targeted company’s name multiple times within the emails.

This strategy is supposedly designed to help induce a feeling of trust and make the targets think that the phishing emails were really sent from within their organization.

“In the email body, the recipient’s company name was also used numerous times to impersonate an internal document shared by this service,”.

“Recipients may be convinced that the email is safe and coming from their company because of the repetitive inclusion of the company name.”

The phishing messages’ goal is to make the targets click on an embedded hyperlink that sends them to a SharePoint themed landing page through a series of redirects.

This is where they are required to click on a button to download “important documents” mentioned within the phishing emails, a button that will either download a PDF that sends them to another website or that will redirect them to a submission form where they are asked to input their credentials.

If the targets fall for the phishers’ tricks, their Microsoft credentials will give the attackers’ full control of their Office 365 accounts, with their information to be stolen and used as apart of identity theft and fraud schemes such as Business Email Compromise (BEC).

“This places employees and their networks at considerable risk as attackers can launch internal attacks to steal more credentials and information from the organization”.