Airport email scam blocked by UK security centre
Scammers attempted to defraud thousands of air passengers by sending a bogus email from a UK airport.
They used a fake gov.uk address to try to persuade 200,000 passengers to send money with the promise of receiving a larger refund.
However, the messages were prevented from receiving the intended recipients by GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which revealed the scam in its annual report.
It did not name the airport involved, but it said the attempted fraud was committed last August.
It was one of 140,000 separate phishing attacks prevented by NCSC in the past year.
In the case of the airport security scam, the security centre blocked the emails and also took the criminals’ real email address offline to ensure they couldn’t receive any replies.
This is the second progress report published by the NCSC for its Active Cyber Defence programme, which was launched in late-2016.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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