OPENING GOOGLE DRIVE SPAM ON PHONE HOW TO

Unlike regular spam, which Gmail does a pretty good job of filtering out, this message not only makes it into your inbox, it gets an added layer of legitimacy by coming from Google itself. An email notification created by the scam, which also comes from Google, also contains a potentially malicious link. If tapped, the notification takes you directly to a document that contains a very large, tempting link.

OPENING GOOGLE DRIVE SPAM ON PHONE HOW TO

On mobile, the scam uses the collaboration feature in Google Drive to generate a push notification inviting people to collaborate on a document. How to eliminate Google Docs comment spam messages from your Gmail inbox: Open Gmail in a desktop/laptop web browser. The smartest part of the scam is that the emails and notifications it generates come directly from Google. Google Drive is adding the ability for users to block other accounts from sharing files with them, in a move that’s designed to prevent potential harassment on the platform. The scam itself is nothing new – messages asking you to click on dodgy links are as old as the internet itself – but could catch a lot of people off guard. A flaw in the Drive is being exploited to send out seemingly legitimate emails and push notifications from Google that, if opened, could land people on malicious websites. The Netskope Security Cloud platform provides our customers protection against attacks like these launched from cloud apps.Scammers just found a new phishing lure to play with: Google Drive. We expect spam like this to continue in the near to medium term, and for it to take on election, coronavirus, and holiday themes through the coming months. We urge users to be extra careful in clicking on links in any cloud app, even if it is a cloud app that you commonly use. In this example, spammers succeeded in using comments in Google Slides to deliver spam messages that bypass common filters. ConclusionsĬybercriminals are always looking for new ways to abuse cloud apps. The documents involved in this spam campaign were reported to Google on October 29, 2020, and promptly taken down. Figure 3: Types of malicious links in Google Drive Disclosure The most common types of attacks linked victims to phishing pages (14%) or malware delivery points (76%). Over the past year, 2% of those links were spam, like in this example.

The following figure breaks down types of attacks cybercriminals launched using Google Drive, where the goal was to get users to click on a malicious link. In total, 17% of malicious websites we block our users from visiting come from links in cloud apps. Over the past year, we have detected and blocked a variety of attacks launched by cybercriminals leveraging a variety of cloud apps, including Google Drive. Then tap on the three horizontal lines in the top left corner of your screen. One reason for their popularity is the fact that attacks launched from cloud apps can often subvert enterprise security controls, such as email or URL filtering. Open the App that is causing the issue that is open Google Drive, Sheets, Slides, Docs. ContextĬloud apps are a popular vehicle for the distribution of malicious content. In the Google Drive mobile APP there is a Notification Settings which you may use to protect yourself from receiving further SPAM: Tap Settings (3 horizontal. The motive was to entice recipients to sign up for a premium adult website. This particular spam message was targeted generally at personal accounts and not any specific enterprises or demographics. The document itself is a Google Slides presentation with a single slide containing a hyperlink that redirects the user to an adult website: Figure 2: Spam Slides presentation

In this example, the comment masquerades as a postal notification: Figure 1: Spam comment

In this Google Slides example, the sender appears as “Message Service (Google Slides).” “Message Service” is the name chosen by the spammer to make this appear official and “(Google Slides)” is appended by Google to all Google Slides comments. The email is sent by, an address used for comments added to any files hosted in Google Drive. The spam is delivered in the form of a comment on a Google Docs document or Google Slides presentation. In fact, may be explicitly allowed by your spam filters. Because the messages are sent by Google Docs, it is likely that your spam filters do not detect and block these messages. Both the comment and the document link the user to a spam or scam website.

The spam messages come in the form of a comment on a document or presentations and are sent by. Netskope Threat Labs is warning users to be careful of spam messages being shared via Google Docs.

Opening google drive spam on phone