Monday Morning
To begin this week, two of our PC Matic team members were targeted by a malicious email attachment from a contact they recently met. Both employees recognized right away something fishy with the email and believed it to be something malicious. All members of our team have taken part in the KnowBe4 cyber security training in the past, and it showed here. We’ll give you the details of the email to hopefully help you avoid similar emails in the future, even if they come from someone you know. After analyzing this threat, PC Matic would have stopped it at execution, but avoiding falling into these infection traps all together is always a good practice to maintain.
The Email
After attending a show recently, our sales team was contacting potential customers and partners that we met to begin a relationship. However one of these contacts may have had their email hacked as it began distributing malware. Their email account was sending out carbon copy responses to everyone they had corresponded with in the past. Check out the email below and see if you would have made the same decision as our team did. It may not be a message that screams malware, but it’s important to understand the variety of ways that cyber criminals work in.
If you were still not skeptical of this email after it was sent to you, opening the Word Document leads to a request for macros to be enabled. You should never enable macros on a random document that was sent to you as these macros will often access malware on the web and pull it down onto your computer. Here’s a sample of the screen you would see if you opened the document.
If you receive a document and didn’t expect macros to be enabled, be very suspicious of it. You may want to reach out to the person who sent it to you via a different means of communication and ask them to confirm. It’s always better to be safe than sorry! PC Matic customers would be protected either way, as Super Shield will detect and stop the malware before it can execute even if you enabled macros.
If you are a PC Matic customer and have not taken advantage of your included cyber security training with KnowBe4, please contact our support team for details at pcmatic.com/help.
