Watch Out For The 'Annual Salary Adjustment' Scam

A new scam is fishing out to steal the credentials of victims, called the "Annual salary adjustment" scam.

The method of distribution is the usual - malicious spam email campaigns. The address shown as the origin of the malicious email will usually have something to do with accounting in it, to go along with the theme of the scam. The text of the scam emails goes as follows:

Subject: Salary_Reviews.pdf

(victim name)

Annual salary adjustment.pdf 897.3 KB

Salary_Reviews.pdf 0.75 MB

Preview Documents

Even though there is barely any explanatory text in the scam email, for a lot of people seeing a PDF file with salary adjustments will be enough to get them to click the "Preview Documents" button. Doing this will open a phishing site, skinned to resemble the Quire filesharing platform. Instead of being asked to log into Quire, victims are told they are about to access "sensitive information" and are asked to first enter their email credentials.

Doing this will only hand the victim's login information into the hands of the scammers, leading to a very likely account takeover, with the victim soon to be locked out of their own email.

Be very careful with unsolicited emails that show up in your inbox and never enter your login information on unknown domains.