Zoom scam threatens you with being fired: What to do now

Zoom scam threatens you with existence fired: What to do now

Woman in yellow top clapping hand to forehead while holding laptop.

(Image credit: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock)

A barbarous new phishing scam arrives in your email inbox reminding you of an "emergency" company Zoom coming together that'south due to first in only a few minutes. Why should you bring together in? Considering the email says you might be getting fired.

Researchers at Aberrant Security discovered this ruse and shared a sample e-mail message, which calls itself an "Offer Letter Review Meeting" and pretends to come up from your employer.

Zoom privacy and security bug: Hither'south what'south wrong then far
Zoom five.0 is out now: How to upgrade and what's new
Just in: Surprise report says Zoom is safer than FaceTime

"Your presence is crucial to this meeting and as required to commence this Q1 functioning review meeting," the trunk of the electronic mail says. The stated purpose of the coming together: "Contract Suspension/Termination Trial."

Yeah, we'd click on that pretty quickly likewise. It merely so happens there'south a handy text link right in the body of the e-mail to "Join this Live Meeting." That link takes you lot to what appears to be the Zoom login page, but it'due south in fact a perfect imitation with a URL that's unlike from the real URL at "https://zoom.us/signin".

If yous enter your Zoom credentials, then your credentials become the bad guys' credentials, and they'll take full access to your Zoom account equally well as to any other business relationship with which you used the same username and countersign. (Don't reuse passwords, and apply one of the best password managers.)

You won't go access to Zoom by logging into this page, and as Abnormal Security points out, you might recollect in that location was an error and enter your credentials a 2nd fourth dimension.

How to avert this phishing scam

Abnormal Security found this scam campaign using Microsoft's Office 365 email services, but in fact this could happen on near whatsoever e-mail platform.

To avoid falling for such phishing scams, the easiest thing to practise is to not click on links inside emails and, declining that, to check where a weblink takes you by hovering your mouse pointer over it before clicking to display the destination URL.

The urgency of this phishing email is designed to make you forget such safeguards, nonetheless. And we have to confess that a similar phishing email fooled u.s.a. a couple of years ago. The only thing that saved our bacon was that we happened to have one of the best antivirus programs installed -- it blocked our browser from displaying the phishing folio.

Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom'south Guide focused on security and privacy. He has also been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul commuter, code monkey and video editor. He's been rooting around in the information-security space for more than than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom's Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown up in random TV news spots and fifty-fifty moderated a console discussion at the CEDIA habitation-engineering conference. You tin follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.