Email Phishing Campaign Using Legitimate Top-Level Domain to Evade Spam Filters

PALM BEACH, FL – A sophisticated email phishing campaign is making the rounds while evading email filters by using a Google domain redirect. According to ThreatPost.com, a leading source of information about IT and business security, the campaign uses percentage-based URL encoding to deceive users.

The campaign makes use of what’s called percentage-based URL encoding – a basic URL-encoding technique in which normal ASCII characters (i.e., “abc” and “123”) are converted into a string that starts with “%” and is followed by two hexadecimal digits. When resolving such an address, Google will convert this non-ASCII format into a string that is universally accepted and understood by all web browsers and servers, on the fly.

Tara Seals, ThreatPost.com

You’ll want to keep your eye out for any email that contains a link that winds up looking like some sort of Google redirect which is allowing it to slip through email filters based on a legitimate domain being used.

If you want to get more information about how this is slipping through email filters, click here.

John Colascione

About The Author: John Colascione is Chief Executive Officer of Internet Marketing Services Inc. He specializes in Website Monetization, is a Google AdWords Certified Professional, authored a ‘how to’ book called ”Mastering Your Website‘, and is a key player in several Internet related businesses through his search engine strategy brand Searchen Networks®