Security News > 2022 > May > Phishers taking advantage of Gmail’s SMTP relay service to impersonate brands
Phishers taking advantage of Gmail's SMTP relay service to impersonate brands.
It was recently found by cloud email security company Avanan that phishers have been exploiting Gmail's SMTP relay service since at least April.
By taking advantage of the SMTP relay service, spoofers are able to work around users' spam folders by allowing phishing emails to impersonate legitimate companies, thus making malicious emails seem authentic even though an attempted hack is taking place.
Gmail allows some Google plans to send up to 4.6 million emails in a 24-hour period, allowing malicious parties to have extremely wide attack vectors when sending out phishing attempts.
"There has been a recent uptick in attackers leveraging 'trusted' sources to increase the odds that are often allow-listed by their targets. As the research states, this attack utilized the Google SMTP relay service, but similar attacks come from compromising an initial victim's email systems and then using that to send further attacks to secondary targets."
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