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Liverpool Echo
Liverpool Echo
World
James Rodger & Kate Lally

Millions of Gmail and Outlook users hit with 'red alert' warning

Gmail and Microsoft Outlook users have hit with a "red alert" warning over a huge increase in sophisticated email scams.

Cyber defence company BlueVoyant warns of "dynamic phishing", with their report explaining: "One of the more complicated ways threat actors evade detection involves multiple redirect paths, steering consumers to spoofed domains while redirecting presumed threat hunters or phishing analysts to an error page.

"These evasion mechanisms include User Agent or IP restrictions and block-listing, with significant emphasis placed on bot and crawler detection.

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"The purpose of this type of redirection is to hide the phishing content on a single website by diverting threat hunters elsewhere, i.e. the target's official domain, a google search, etc."

BlueVoyant added that Dynamic DNS hosting providers are "particularly popular among threat actors - a term used to describe an individual or group which has the potential to impact your security - because they provide a convenient platform to easily set up and host multiple phishing pages without having to register a domain", Birmingham Live reports.

The cyber defence experts have also noted a steady increase in SMS phishing (smishing). The report continues: "To carry out a successful smishing attack, threat actors require an automated tool that can send SMS messages in bulk.

"SMS gateway scripts are sold on the deep and dark web as all-inclusive solutions, which are rather easy to operate, and require very little technical knowledge.”

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