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 is Chief Executive Officer of SEARCHEN NETWORKS®, a digital marketing and technology company founded in 2001. An entrepreneur, author, and digital publisher with more than 25 years of experience, he specializes in search engine marketing, Website Monetization, domain names, and online business development. He is the author of Mastering Your Website and publishes commentary on technology, digital marketing, and the evolving Internet economy. Read more at JohnColascione.com.
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