For a while now, criminals have been breaking into email accounts and using them to spam the account’s address book with phishing emails or the like. More evil criminals will change the account password, and/or delete the address book and the email to make it harder for the account owner to warn people about what’s happened.

My mother recently received an email, purportedly from my cousin’s husband, titled “Confidential Doc”. It was a mock-up of a Dropbox “I’ve shared an item with you” email, with the “View Document” URL actually being http://proshow.kz/excel/OLE/PPS/redirect.php. This (currently) redirects to http://www.affordablewebdesigner.co.uk/components/com_wrapper/views/wrapper/tmpl/dropbox/, although it redirected to another site at the time. That page says “Select your email provider”, explaining “Now, you can sign in to dropbox with your email”. When you click the name of your email provider, it asks you for your email address and password. And boom – they have another account to abuse.

But the really interesting thing was that my mother, not being born yesterday, emailed back saying “I’ve just received an email from you. But it has no text – just an item to share. Is it real, or have you been hacked?” So far, so cautious. But she actually got a reply! It said:

Hi <her shortened first name>,
I sent it, It is safe.
<his first name>

(The random capital was in the original.)

Now, this could have been a very smart templated autoresponder, but I think it’s more likely that the guy stayed logged into the account long enough to “reassure” people and to improve his hit rate. That might tell us interesting things about the value of a captured email account, if it’s worth spending manual effort trying to convince people to hand over their creds.