5,000 sophisticated fake Microsoft emails discovered targeting employees

Scammers posing as Microsoft employees or affiliated vendors and tricking employees into falling for fake emails is very common. But a recent survey done by Check Point's Harmony Email & Collaboration found that over 5,000 fake Microsoft emails were detected in the past month alone that poses a serious threat to businesses. These highly sophisticated phishing attempts are nearly indistinguishable from legitimate communications.

What’s happening

The fake Microsoft emails don’t originate from private or unknown domains — a clue that the emails are potential threats. Rather, the emails appear to come from organizational domains impersonating legitimate administrators.

The main portion of a given email will typically include a fake login page or portal, where malicious content may be hidden. An unsuspecting user can easily click on this and input sensitive information or download a threat.

To hide the malicious intent of these emails, cyber criminals are deploying sophisticated obfuscation techniques. Some emails include copied-and-pasted Microsoft privacy policy statements, contributing to an authentic ‘look and feel’.

Other emails have links to Microsoft or Bing pages, making it even more challenging for traditional security systems to recognize and mitigate these threats effectively.

For example, a cyber criminal has spoofed a Microsoft email and also impersonated an organization’s business administrator, sending a (fake) email on the administrator’s behalf. The email looks believable. In particular, the style of the email is so duplicative of what users generally receive that a given user would have no reason to flag it.

Mitigations

There are measures that organizations can take to sidestep these email-based threats. They include:

User awareness training: This requires a mention, although generative AI-based text means that users can no longer rely on grammatical errors and stylistic inconsistencies as primary indicators of social engineering.

AI-powered email security: This stops the full spectrum of inbox incursions. AI-powered email security tools leverage behavioral analysis and machine learning in order to prevent email spoofing, phishing, BEC threats and more.

Software patching: Organizations should keep all software up-to-date, as to prevent cyber criminals from exploiting any bugs that could allow for easy email spoofing or disruption.