Paypal Phishing Scam

An important factor in a successful phishing attack is establishing trust. Users need to trust the source that the phishing message is sent from. That’s why hackers often spoof the email address of a senior executive or vendor contact message so the payload looks like it was sent from a credible source. Phishing can be sent via email or your phone via voice or SMS. Currently doing the rounds is a very believable Paypal text phishing attempt.

The text message is sent from from a shortcode number *729724* and reads:

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Upon first viewing, it may appear to be a PayPal link, but on closer inspection, it clearly takes you to a different domain. The text warns that your PayPal account has been locked out and asks you to follow a link to restore access. If you visit the link as requested, a fake PayPal webpage is loaded in your smartphone’s browser.

Everyone who is sent one of these Paypal texts to delete it at once. Always review your messages before you click, or even better – just don’t visit the link and contact PayPal directly.

Phishing messages can originate from an increasing number of sources, such as:

Email accounts

Phone calls

Fraudulent software (e.g, anti-virus)

Social Media communications (e.g., Facebook, Twitter)

Adverts

SMS

In most cases random phishing attacks are identified by email filters, but spear phishing attacks are much more complex and use employee background data to avoid filters and provide a higher level of ROI for the hacker. A hacker can spend days (weeks even) gathering data on employees and use this data to email them directly.

With the SpamTitan Email Filter, you can fully safeguard your exchange server and every recipient within the group. SpamTitan provides phishing protection to stop whaling and spear phishing by scanning all inbound email in actual time.

SpamTitan searches for standard indicators in the email header, domain information, and content. SpamTitan also carries out reputation analysis on all links (including shortened URLs) included in emails and block malicious emails before being sent to the end user.

How SpamTitan pro from phishing attacks:

URL reputation analysis during scanning for multiple reputations.

Discover and block malicious spear-phishing emails with either current or new malware.

Heuristic rules to identify phishing based on message headers et al. These are updated often to address new threats.

Simple synchronization with Active Directory and LDAP.

Spam Confidence Levels can be entered by user, user-group and domain.

Whitelisting or blacklisting senders/IP addresses.

Infinitely scalable and universally applicable

How WebTitan Internet Filtering Solutions Protect against Phishing

WebTitan provides an advanced yet easy to use DNS-based solution to safeguard your company and users when online. In real-time, it both secures and protects your business from online threats including malware, phishing, botnets and malicious sites. WebTitan uses multiple mechanisms to help network administrators filter web access properly. The threats from malware, ransomware, and phishing are addressed with pre-installed and automatically updated blacklists, SURBL filters, and URIBL filters. SSL inspection checks for the presence of malware in encrypted websites, and every web page is virus scanned.

The WebTitan range of Internet filtering solutions has been specifically created with protection against malware, ransomware, and phishing as a priority, and flexibility and ease of use in mind also. Each WebTitan solution is backed up with industry-leading customer and technical service to help network administrators apply the optimum settings to filter web access effectively in all cases.

If you are searching for an effective Internet filtering solution, or you have tried different solutions to filter web access and found them not to be effective, please do not hesitate to contact us and ask for a free trial of a WebTitan Internet filtering solution. Our team of Sales Technicians will help figure out which solution is the most appropriate for your specific requirements and explain our free trial for you.

We would also like to hear from any Managed Service Provider searching for a multi-tenanted solution to filter web access on behalf of SMBs. Our free trial gives you the chance to evaluate our industry-leading Internet filtering solution in your own environment, and your clients the opportunity to supply feedback on how effective WebTitan is at stopping all types of malware, ransomware and phishing campaigns.

To safeguard against advanced threats you need advanced security. Take a better look at SpamTitan and WebTitan today – and sign up for a free demo.