Fishing emails?

[coad]

I have received two emails from "Sonic Service" that smell pretty bad but are making it through the filters. The subject is "EMAIL NOTICE UPDATE" and includes the text "This is a one-time user verification to provide a more secure platform and shut down robots or malicious users created for spamming and other fraudulent activities."

The headers show that it came from dr419@buckeye-express.com.

Is anyone else getting these?

Sonic: can you block these messages?

Thanks,

--paul

[dane]

We try, but they are tough to block because they are so Sonic-specific. The large global blocklists and content scoring filters that we use to filter for drug sales, scams, offshore drop shippers etc just don't know about a phishing message crafted just for a subset of Sonic customers and targetted at them directly.

What we can generally do is block the dead-drop website in our DNS. If someone has reported the message to Support, that'll have been done. This means that people who are fooled and click on it will just get an "It's a trap" landing page that explains that this is phishing.

[kgc]

Sonic: can you block these messages?

The problem is, of course, that you only see the ones we don't.

We are generally in a reactive position with these and it's impossible for us to get them all. It's even been clear that in some cases they are using exploited accounts to test our filters in order to craft phishing messages that get through all of our defenses.

[coad]

Thanks! The fact that the big guns came out for this type of query is one of the main reasons I have been here for so long.

I get that this is a hard problem. The email was pretty well crafted. I also appreciate all of the spam that is killed before they hit my inbox.

The email has been reported to support@sonic.net.

--paul

[johnv]

I, too, have noticed a huge increase in this type of fishing in the last month or so; sometimes multiple emails a day. At least they are very obvious and easy to delete. Occasionally I click on them and provide fake data in the hope that I might waste some of their time.