Simulated Phishing Email of January 2025

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Can you trust this page?
If you look in the address bar (at the top of this page) you will see that this page is on the blog.bham.ac.uk site. This tells you that the page is within the bham.ac.uk internet domain which is owned by the University of Birmingham. If you came to this page to confirm if a test phishing email really was a test, then also check that the image of the email below matches the email you were sent.

On Tuesday 28th January, IT Security sent a number of staff a simulated phishing email claiming to be from Support Center, Microsoft Secure Department. The Subject was Password Expiration Notice – Keep Your Current password. It pretended to be a Password Expiration Notice and contained a link to Keep My Current Password. If you clicked on that link you were asked for your username and password.

Those people who entered a username and password were taken to a page reassuring them this was a benign phishing simulation by IT Security. No passwords were collected or stored!

Why we did this
Our aim is not to penalise, embarrass or make anyone feel bad if they “fell for the scam”. You are not in any trouble. No-one will be “named and shamed”. Your line manager will not be told. We think of this as serving the same purpose as an unannounced fire drill, to make people more aware of the most common way that criminals steal passwords.

Criminals usually have more experience in conning honest people, than honest people have in protecting themselves. We want to help you to protect yourself (and the University) by raising awareness of how easy it is to be lured into giving away your personal details and password by malicious emails that appear genuine.

This simulated phishing email is based on recent real-life phishing emails intercepted by our automated defences.


The email – with the suspicious parts marked in red

Screenshot of benign phishing email with three red highlights.  1 below the Sender's fake name of noreply@corpoutlook.co.uk 2 circling yellow caution this email originated from outside the organisation. 3 hovering over the Open button shows it links to a fake address of update.corpoutlook.co.uk

This email is suspicious because:

  1. The University of Birmingham has a password expiry policy for good security reasons. Why would we make password updating optional? This is too convenient to be true.
  2. It claims to be about your University password but it comes from outside the University.
  3. The logo doesn’t look quite right and the wording might seem odd. Although spelling and grammar mistakes are often an indication of spam or phishing, perfect spelling and grammar do not mean that it is a genuine email. Some scammers can write perfect English – with or without the help of AI tools such as Microsoft CoPilot or ChatGPT.
  4. It asks for a username and password. Any email which links to a place where you are asked to give your username and password, should be treated with caution – you should pause, think and ask yourself:

Who is it really from?
Does the sending address match the alleged Sender?
In this case, the Sender’s email domain address is 
@corpoutlook.co.uk
not
@bham.ac.uk or microsoft.com
as you might expect if were really from the University of Birmingham or Microsoft

Where does the link take you?
You can reveal the full address:

  • on a computer, by hovering the mouse pointer over the link (without clicking on it!)
  • on a phone/tablet by a long press holding down on the link.

In this example, the Keep My Current Password button links to update.corpoutlook.co.uk which is not a University or Microsoft website.


You should always ask yourself the following:

  • was I expecting this email?
  • is the Sender known to me?
  • and was I expecting them to send/share this file?

Fraudsters are very devious in using addresses which look similar to genuine ones. This page, from CalTech, shows you how to read URLs (web addresses) correctly to help you to avoid some of the dirty tricks used https://www.imss.caltech.edu/services/security/recommendations/how-to-read-urls

You can test your knowledge by identifying which of 10 emails are legitimate or phishing here https://www.phishingbox.com/phishing-iq-test/quiz.php

If you work or study at the University of Birmingham and have questions or comments about this phishing campaign then contact: itsecurity@contacts.bham.ac.uk

 

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