Outline
Message purporting to be from online payment service PayPal claims that recipients must click a link to confirm their identity and activate their account.
Brief Analysis
The message is not from PayPal. Links in the bogus message open a website that harbours malware.
Example
Subject: Confirmation Required
Confirm your identity
Dear (email address removed),
To finish signing up for your PayPal account, you must click the link below and enter your password to confirm your identity.
Click to activate your account.
After you confirm your identity, you can send money, accept unlimited credit card and bank account payments, use special tools for sellers and receive Customer Service hotline help 7 days a week. You’ll pay just a small fee for receiving payments.
You’ll also enjoy the benefit of Buyer Protection for most items you buy on eBay. See terms
You can also confirm your identity by logging in to your PayPal account at [Link removed]. Click the “Confirm identity address” link in Notifications and then enter confirmation details.
Thank you for using PayPal!
The PayPal Team
Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not receive a response. For assistance, log in to your PayPal account and click the Help link in the top right corner of any PayPal page.
To receive email notifications in plain text instead of HTML, update your preferences.
Detailed Analysis
This message, which purports to be from online Payment company PayPal, claims that recipients must click a link to confirm their identity and activate their PayPal account. The email arrives complete with PayPal graphics and formatting.
However, the email is not from Paypal. Instead, it is an attempt to trick users into infecting their computers with malware. Those who click the link will be taken, not to a PayPal page as they expect, but rather to a compromised website that harbours hidden malware programs.
Once on the compromised site, users may be tricked into downloading and installing the malware. Typically, such malware can harvest personal and financial information from the infected computer and relay it back to remote servers operated by online criminals. It may also download more malware and allow the criminals to control the compromised computer from afar.
To further the illusion of legitimacy, the malware email comes from an address that – at first glance – may seem to be a genuine PayPal address. In reality, the email address has an extra character (“paypall” rather than “paypal” and has no connection to the real PayPal website.
This campaign is similar in intent to an earlier campaign that used fake PayPal payment notification emails as a means of distributing malware.
PayPal customers are also, almost constantly, targeted in phishing scams designed to steal their PayPal login details and other personal and financial information.
Be wary of any email purporting to be from PayPal that claims that you must update or validate account details, fix an account error, or verify an unexpected payment. Genuine PayPal emails will always address you by name rather than by using your email address or a generic greeting such as “Dear Customer”.
It is always safest to login to your PayPal account by entering the address into your browser’s address bar rather than by clicking a link in an unsolicited message. You can reports suspect emails claiming to be from PayPal to the reporting address listed on the PayPal website.
Original Source : https://www.hoax-slayer.net/paypal-confirm-your-identity-malware-emails/