Don’t Fall Prey to “Stolen Images” Phishing Emails

Healthcare organizations are the primary target for ransomware attacks, with an astounding 109 attempts per entity every week. These attacks can shut down your practice’s ability to serve patients, cause immeasurable damage to your brand and patients’ trust, and can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom, forensics, and fines.

Healthcare organizations are the primary target for ransomware attacks, with an astounding 109 attempts per entity every week.

Med Tech Solutions and our security partners are working around the clock to help protect our clients from emerging threats. One of these partners, Avertium, recently notified us about an uptick in “Stolen Images” phishing emails. These emails accuse the recipient of using copyrighted images without permission and threatens legal action if the stolen images are not removed from the organization’s website. A link to the photographer’s copyright documentation is provided, which downloads a malicious JavaScript file when clicked. While this campaign has been active for over a year, recent activity suggests this tactic is being used more widely against larger organizations.

Stolen Images Phishing Email – Example

Here’s what an example of what the stolen images copyright email looks like:

Hello,

This is Melane and I am a qualified photographer.

I was discouraged, to put it nicely, when I found my images at your website. If you use a copyrighted image without an owner’s license, you need to be aware that you could be sued by the copyright holder.

It’s not legal to use stolen images and it’s so cheap!

Here is the document with the links to my images you used at www.LINK.com and my earlier publications to obtain the evidence of my legal copyrights.

Download it right now and check this out for yourself: https://sites.google.com/view

If you don’t delete the images mentioned in the document above during the next couple of days, I’ll file a complaint on you to your hosting provider informing them that my copyrights have been severely infringed and I am tying to protect my intellectual property.

And if it doesn’t work, for damn sure I am going to take it to court! And I won’t give you a prior notice again.

You can see how easy it would be for one of your employees to be fooled into clicking on this link.

We continuously monitor for phishing activity and alert clients if evidence of phishing is detected in their network, and add indicators of compromise (IOCs) related to this phishing campaign to our managed SIEMs. But there are also actions you can take to reduce your risk of this and other phishing campaigns.

Our comprehensive program tests your employees’ likelihood of falling victim to phishing scams and provides training and support.

Schedule a Phishing Assessment for Your Practice

Contact us to schedule a phishing assessment to understand and manage your risks. Our comprehensive program tests your employees’ likelihood of falling victim to phishing scams and provides training and support to help them help you protect your patients’ valuable data and your practice’s well-being.