Ten thousand users working in a major online brokerage company in North America were targeted by malicious hackers who used social engineering and brand impersonation techniques to gain the users’ trust and urged them to act swiftly. This gave users little time to think about the email and fall victim to the attack.

Users were redirected to a spoofed Outlook login page after clicking on the link. This login page asked for the users’ credentials, thereby luring them into entering their account emails and passwords.

As per the report’s details, users noted that clicking on a ‘Start Meeting’ button is a routine habit for them. Since the email contents followed a very familiar format, their brains did what they were programmed to do and acted quickly.

Phishing emails can be pretty easy to identify because they come with grammatical errors and links that do not lead to the websites they state. Moreover, phishing emails follow a format that resembles the original senders. Most times, simply hovering your computer mouse over a listed link can prevent you from a cyberattack.

Aimed at more than 21,000 users at a national healthcare company, the phishing email included a subject line of “For [name of recipient] on Today, 2022” with each user’s actual name listed as the recipient.

Displaying the #Zoom name and logo, the email itself claimed that the person had two messages waiting for their response. To read the alleged messages, the recipient had to click on a main button in the body of the message.

The main button would have taken users to a phony landing page spoofing a Microsoft login site. At the site, the victims were instructed to enter their Microsoft account password supposedly to verify their identity before they could access the messages.

The landing page already populated the username field with the person’s actual email address to further lull them into a sense of security. Naturally, any Microsoft pa.