A couple of our Office 365 customers are seeing a sudden increase of phishing emails lately.  These emails appear to come from Microsoft and look very legitimate, but contain links to malicious websites.  The trend began in the past couple of weeks, and has been very persistent.  A common theme seems to involve telling a person that their email quota has been filled, and they need to “click here” to upgrade.

We often advise customers to be skeptical of email messages, particularly ones that contain links and are unexpected or seem out of place.  In both cases, our customers forwarded the messages to us with the question “should we be concerned about this?”  That’s exactly the right thing to do when in doubt, and more often than not, one should probably be in doubt!

We work hard to instill our customers with a sense of calm and stability regarding technology, and we work hard to ensure our customers aren’t required to participate in maintenance activities.  It’s because of these reasons that, for our customers, phishing emails like these look so suspicious.  A skeptical customer is a happy customer!