Happy Easter
Reporting spam email to Microsoft with the Report Message add-in for Outlook
Whilst the inbuilt spam and malware filtering built in to Microsoft Office 365 has considerably reduced the amount of unwanted spam email you receive in your email account, a small amount spam can still arrive, or an email may be mistakenly marked as junk when in fact it is legitimate. Fortunately, Microsoft has an addon you can use to further reduce the amount of spam or stop legitimate emails from being marked as junk by reporting this back to them.
Known as the Report Message add-in for Outlook, it enables you to report emails using one of three categories:
- Junk is generally referred to as spam and are unwanted senders that may be advertising their products or services to you.
- Phishing is a person or organisation claiming to be someone else to seek your personal information. The email may appear to be legitimate but in fact is not.
- Not junk is a legitimate email which has been misclassified as Junk.
The Report Message add-in for Outlook can be used on both Outlook and Outlook on the web and enables you to report a message as either junk, phishing or not junk. You can also choose to report the message to Microsoft for further review and investigation.
We encourage our clients who are experiencing spam issues to look at implementing this as part of their cyber security strategy.
For more information and how to set this up, please feel free to contact us.
Don’t be an April Fool – Watch out for business email compromise!
We have seen an increasing number of reports for business email compromise affecting organisations, so we are calling on everyone not to be an April fool!
“Business email compromise” is a where a hacker gains access to a corporate email account by pretending to be a figure such as a business owner, manager or other decision maker to defraud the organisations or its employees, customers or suppliers of money.
Whilst these scams targeted businesses working with suppliers and businesses that regularly make electronic payments in the past, small businesses and not-for-profit organisations are no longer immune.
We are aware of several cases where a business owner was compromised through a fake email which included a link to download a file from SharePoint or Google Drive location.
In order to download the file, the owner was required to login to what appeared to be a genuine Microsoft or Google sign in page, but was actually fake. Once the account details were entered they were saved and sent to the hacker.
The hacker then used these details to log in and review the contents of the business owner’s email, often accessing their email or address book, to identify contacts from their business, and use their email to send a compromised email to either the accounts department or the business’s clients.
The emails sent to accounts and/or clients contain a fictious invoice requesting payment or another fake link to a Microsoft or Google login page as well, then both the CEO and accounts have been compromised.
In some cases, once the scammer had control of the email account used they set up rules to forward incoming email to an external email address of the hacker, automatically delete all email coming the inbox and remove the contents of the current inbox altogether so the account holder was unaware the new email had ever been received.
To protect yourself from such scams, we strongly suggest reviewing your protection strategies including staff education and training before you are compromised. If you receive an email from someone and are required to login to access a document or invoice and you weren’t expecting it, call the sender to confirm it is legitimate. It is important to quickly get onto it.
CyberGuru provides a range of services including consulting, support and training to protect against cyber threats such as these. If we can be of assistance, please contact us.
Ask CyberGuru: Is Google closing down?
In this month’s Ask CyberGuru, we are asked, “I have received an email advising me that Google is closing down on 2 April, is this true?”.
We have had a number of clients and family members check in with us regarding the closure of Google. It is in fact Google+ which is closing down, not the Google search engine. Google+, sometimes written as Google Plus or G+. Google+ was developed by Google to be a social media platform, as their attempt to compete with Facebook. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been overly successful and some major security issues have recently been identified, resulting in Google’s decision to close down the platform.
Google have announced that Google+ is closing down on 2 April as noted on the email you may have received. It is our understanding all Google+ account holders and managers have been advised by email regarding what the steps to take. Affected services include Google+ Circles, Community and Stream, but not Google My Business or any other Google services.
If you do not use Google+, then it is safe to ignore this message and you don’t need to take any action. However, if you have posted content, such photos on Google+, then you should follow the links to download your content as the article suggests. You do have the option to download your data prior to the transition, which can be exported to either your computer or another service. If you are unsure of whether you need any material currently stored on Google+, then we recommend that you download and save anyway, in case you do find anything valuable stored in there.
If we can be of assistance or you have a question you would like to ask CyberGuru, please contact us.
It’s time to update your Google Chrome browser!
On Friday 1 March, Google announced it had discovered a Zero-Day Vulnerability “CVE-2019-5786” in its Google Chrome browser. It’s time to update your Google Chrome browser!
Whilst only limited details have been published on the Chrome Releases blog, it is strongly suggested that you update Google Chrome if you are using this as your browser.
It is important to check you are running the latest version of Chrome, which at the time of writing is 72.0.3626.121.
To check for and install updates in Google Chrome on the PC or Mac:
- Click on the three vertical dots on the right-hand side near the address bar.
- Point to Help and click About Google Chrome.
- This should then check and install updates, which may take a few minutes depending on your computer and internet speed.
- If it has performed an update, you may need to relaunch Google Chrome to finish updating. If it says “Google Chrome is up to date”, you are good to go.
If you are running Google Chrome on your mobile phone or tablet, you should do this as well. Go to the Google Play Store or iTunes Store to download and install the required update.
This is a good reminder to always keep your computer’s software and devices’ apps up-to-date with the latest security updates. If you are looking for assistance with this, CyberGuru provides a computer maintenance service where provide scheduled proactive review and upkeep of your ICT environment and keep it up-to-date on your behalf. We can do this both face-to-face and remotely depending on your requirements. Please contact us for more information.