Increase in LinkedIn Phishing Attacks
- Former user (Deleted)
With the recent activity in the job market, it appears that LinkedIn has become the latest avenue for attackers. Emails that appear to be from LinkedIn are being spoofed (impersonated) by bad-actors often times claiming new job opportunities, profiles views or searches that your name has been a part of. Many times these attacks are coming from other compromised email accounts so they appear more legitimate in addition to formatting the messages to look identical to other official ones from LinkedIn.
According to Cyberwire, links in these emails tend to send you to what’s known as a credential harvesting site - a place that looks like LinkedIn’s login page or sometimes Microsoft or Google log-ins where you enter a username and password which is then scraped (taken by a bad-actor) instead of actually being for the legitimate website (such as LinkedIn or otherwise). This type of credentials phishing email is the most prevalent attack currently being exploited online.
As people are reassessing their career goals, or changing jobs to allow for more remote work as we are coming through COVID, attackers are realizing there is a lot of opportunity in this area.
Responding to Phishing
It’s important to remember that we’re all human and prone to making mistakes. We recommend two possible responses to these kinds of phishing emails.
- If you notice it, the best thing to do is report the email to Google. That will then impact our entire environment (@bethel.edu). You do so by clicking the 3 vertical dots next to the reply arrow on that specific email and selecting "Report phishing". That then flags the sender and alerts our security team as well as flagging it for anyone else at Bethel (if they targeted multiple people for example).
- If you happened to click on a link, entered credentials or any other action that you worried was a compromise of your account you can reach out to information-security@bethel.edu. Our team will then take any necessary steps to remediate your account and/or device as appropriate.
If you are caught in a phishing attack - don’t feel bad! It happens to us all. Reporting it and letting IT take the steps necessary to re-secure your account is the most important thing you can do in that moment.