14 DAY TRIAL // Experts say the systems of Primrose, a popular British garden accessories company, have been hacked by cybercriminals.
According to Conrad Longmore of Dynamoo’s Blog, email addresses stolen from the firm’s databases are being used in a spam campaign that’s designed to trick users into handing over their PayPal credentials.
“We need your help resolving an issue with your account. To give us time to work together on this, we've temporarily limited what you can do with your account until the issue is resolved. We understand it may be frustrating not to have full access to your PayPal account. We want to work with you to get your account back to normal as quickly as possible,” the malicious emails read.
They continue, “What's the problem ? It's been a little while since you used your account. For reasons relating to the safe use of the PayPal service we need some more information about your account.”
A file attached to the fake PayPal notifications, Account Information-Paypal.html, instructs victims to hand over personal and financial information. The data entered by users is sent to a remote server in Aruba.
Longmore said he notified Primrose of the breach two weeks ago.
“Primrose.co.uk were informed of the breach on 4th July and told me that IT were investigating, but as I haven't heard anything back and customers haven't been notified then I will assume they did not find anything,” the expert noted.
It’s uncertain at this point what information has been stolen by the hackers, but since the PayPal phishing emails don’t address recipients by their name, it’s possible that only email addresses have been compromised.
The company reportedly encrypts user passwords.
If you are a Primrose customer, beware of suspicious emails. Remember that legitimate companies will never ask you via email to hand over personal or financial information.