Massive increase in robocalls and dangerous phishing
Robocalls are seeing a massive increase lately. Keep in mind that
efforts to stop caller-ID spoofing have largely had no real effect,
because callers now use "throw away" numbers that verify correctly and
then are abandoned after days or even hours. In fact, if you get an
"unknown caller" on your phone, it's likely NOT a spam call, because
spammers can now so easily not bother spoofing or blocking their
numbers, they just keep switching to different "legit" numbers that
spam blocks usually don't detect.
Email phishing is on the rise, and much of it now is bypassing SPF and
DKIM checks (that Google and other large mailers started requiring for
bulk mailings) due to techniques such as DKIM replay and a range of
other methods. Fake PayPal invoices are flooding the Net, and they
often are passing those checks meant to block them. It's reported that
many of these are coming from Microsoft's Outlook, with forged PayPal
email addresses. Easiest way to detect these is to look at the phone
number they want you to call if you have a question -- and if it's not
the legit PayPal customer service number you know it's not really from
PayPal. Getting you to call the scammers on the phone is the basis of
the entire scheme.
It's all getting worse, not better.
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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