Quite a few people are receiving unsolicited ferry booking emails claiming to be from Red Funnel – Beware, as they carry an attachment that will steal your personal information if opened.
The emails, which say they come from [email protected], use all of the Red Funnel branding to try to persuade recipients that it’s real.
The subject line reads: “Red Funnel Ferries Confirmation 5838547”.
Don’t open attached doc
The malware is contained in the Microsoft document that comes with the email.
Don’t open it – it will try to run a macro that will install all sorts of nasty things that will attempt to steal your passwords and/or credit card information.
This has nothing to do with Red Funnel. They are as much victims of this as those who are receiving the emails.
What the scam email looks like
As you can see from the image below, even the graphics at the bottom of the email are ones that Red Funnel would use in their own emails.
As Red Funnel’s server is currently off line, the graphics at the top of the email, such as ‘Confirmation’ are not appearing.
You wouldn’t know the difference apart from the fact the attachment is a Microsoft doc and not a PDF.
Red Funnel aware of the problem
Red Funnel are aware of the scam and are attempting to deal with it.
Red Funnel’s Website was unavailable during the afternoon. They tell OnTheWight this was due to the huge increase in traffic to their graphics that the attempted email scam caused.
OnTheWight contacted Red Funnel and they sent the following statement.
A Red Funnel spokesperson said “Red Funnel is aware that fake booking confirmation emails were sent out today (07 October 2015) purportedly from [email protected] with the subject heading ‘Confirmation 5838547’.
The company can confirm that these emails were not sent by Red Funnel and an advisory has been issued to anyone in receipt of them not to open the MS Word attachment as it could contain a self-propagating virus.
There is no indication that Red Funnel’s security systems have been compromised and specialists have been appointed to identify the source. In the meantime, Red Funnel would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused”.
Advice
Don’t open the email and certainly don’t open the attached document.
My Online Security, the specialist security publication has all of the detail you could ever need.
Update 15:27: Red Funnel statement added, so adjusted copy.
Update 8 Oct 2015: Added RF detail on why server was offline.
