French Internauts Urged to be Wary of Scam Emails Purporting to be from Apple

Security experts of security firm MX Lab urge that Internauts in France should be vigilant in case they take delivery of notifications which appear to have come from software giant, Apple and asking them to authenticate their identity.

When Internauts click on the links of these phishing emails, they are taken to a fake website of Apple where they are told to enter their credentials including their username and password. Once that's completed, victims are redirected to other webpages where they are asked to enter their personal as well as financial information.

On completion of the process, the genuine website of Apple Store in France is showed which most likely avoids raising too much of doubt.

Obviously, it's not good to enter your personal as well as financial details on a site managed by cybercriminals.

To avoid being victim to such malicious schemes, always be certain that you are on a legitimate Apple domain while logging into your email account. The domain name may be skillfully set up to puzzle you but don't forget that scam websites rarely employ HTTPS connections.

Therefore, if the green padlock icon (that indicates the existence of a HTTPS connection) is absent from the address bar of the browser, then you should not disclose any data.

Some of the phishing emails sent by scammers in the past playing off brand Apple have been quite amateurship. Since Apple users have become higher priority targets, the scams have become more professional and employing emails that look almost identical to the legitimate mail that Apple sends to its customers. Experts comment that researchers nowadays see typical phishing emails which include the logo of Apple at the top and use grammatically correct English with same kind of phrases just like the legitimate emails use.

Moreover, the above campaign is not the sole malicious email campaign in recent times that has exploited brand name of Apple. In second week of August 2013, security firm Webroot revealed a malicious email campaign attempting to trick users to think that they have won a Gift Card of Apple Store worth $200. However, rather than being a simple phishing effort with such emails, it was maligned with contain.

» SPAMfighter News - 9/17/2013