E-Payment Alert Notification From Another US Bank – Customer phishing scam

A slightly unusual phishing scam today

https://i2.wp.com/myonlinesecurity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/scam_warning1.gif?fit=300%2C300&ssl=1

The original email is nothing special and has a blank body and a PDF attachment. The PDF has a link to https://kamzink.com/redirect-new-alert-logon/redirect.htm which redirects you to ( or should redirect you to ) https://rattanhospital.co.in/new-usbank-security-update/usbank.com.online.logon/home  However this site only works in Firefox using Noscript when I block scripts from  omtrdc.net. ( which looks like an Adobe Marketing cloud analytics script)  Allowing scripts from that site display a blank page for me in all browsers.  I assume the phishers made a mistake and that script will only work on the genuine website so is  unable to display the page. This shows the error in just copy & pasting an entire website homepage  & just changing a few links on it.  Anyway, anything the phishers do wrong is a step in the right direction to protect users.

Please read our How to protect yourselves page for simple, sensible advice on how to avoid being infected by this sort of socially engineered malware.

The original email looks like this It will NEVER be a genuine email from your bank  any other company so don’t ever click the link in the email. If you do it will lead you to a website that looks at first glance like the genuine usbank website but you can clearly see in the address bar, that it is fake. Some versions of this and similar phishes will ask you fill in the html ( webpage) form that comes attached to the email.

From: US BANK <unitedbankpayment.alert@communication.com>>

Date: Wed 28/12/2016 08:15

Subject: E-Payment Alert Notification From Another US Bank Customer

Attachment: US_Bank_Payment_2_.pdf

Body content:  Blank / Empty

Following the link sends you to a site looking identical to the genuine usbank.com website ( with the above provisos)

All of these emails use Social engineering tricks to persuade you to open the attachments that come with the email. Whether it is a message saying “look at this picture of me I took last night” and it appears to come from a friend or is more targeted at somebody who regularly is likely to receive PDF attachments or Word .doc attachments or any other common file that you use every day. Or whether it is a straight forward attempt, like this one, to steal your personal, bank, credit card or email and social networking log in details. Be very careful when unzipping them and make sure you have “show known file extensions enabled“, And then look carefully at the unzipped file. If it says .EXE then it is a problem and should not be run or opened.