Phishing attempts reported on last month use a mirror image of Google-domain login pages, with familiar logos and CAPTCHAs included. There’s one glaring difference in an otherwise twin-like version of the site, however: a weird-looking URL.

The “bit-for-bit” impersonation—shown in a blog post from the cloud-based email security provider Avanan—is a reminder for everybody to hit the half-speed button and slow down a bit in order to spot irregularities that indicate an attack.

Hovering over links—an important countermeasure, according to the blog—will reveal a less-reliable-sounding URL than the expected login address. The phishy URLs contain phrases like “boiling-fortress” or “spidervella,” instead of, say, “google.”

The hack:

• The user is emailed an “action required” notification of an expired password.
• They click the link and see a familiar login page, which the hackers are dynamically mirroring. (“A lot of phishing campaigns will falter because they look silly, or there’s tons of spelling errors, or something’s off, and it’s just really noticeable. This one looks exactly like your real site,” Jeremy Fuchs, Avanan cybersecurity researcher and analyst, told IT Brew.)
• The user’s email address is even pre-populated in the login form.

While the “boiling-fortress” or “spidervella” aspects of the URL do sound a bit silly, or at least like a band-name idea, not everyone looks at the address, said Fuchs, especially people in a hurry.

The attack is reminiscent of tactics deployed in late 2020 by the group SPAM-EGY—an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that used dynamically updated, realistic-looking Microsoft 365 logins to target higher-education users.

Read the rest here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected] or DM @BillyHurls on Twitter.

Blink, and it’s gone. Amid the turmoil of a second-quarter earnings call, listened to by IT Brew, where Intel execs announced the firm hadn’t come anywhere close to achieving its targets, and later confirmed in its Q2 report, the company disclosed that it is shuttering its long-suffering Optane persistent memory business.

Optane is Intel’s brand name for its 3D XPoint memory technology developed jointly with Micron. Billed as DRAM and solid-state storage combined, the potentially game-changing persistent-memory computing tech was first announced in 2015. Its underlying phase-change technology held immense promise, and Intel packaged 3D XPoint in a variety of products, ranging from DIMMs partially replacing DRAM for data centers to high-end SSDs (as well as a lightning-fast cache for NAND solid-state drives).

Yet as Anandtech explains, Intel’s Optane DIMMs offered much slower performance at a higher price than DRAM, specializing only in extremely memory-intensive workloads, and its storage products couldn’t compete on price with high-performance NAND drives, which just keep getting cheaper.

The Optane business never made money—quite the opposite—and Micron jettisoned itself from the partnership last year. So, the writing was on the wall with this one. According to Intel’s Q2 report, it will be taking a $559 million writedown on “Optane inventory impairment,” meaning the project is shuttered and Intel considers the units it still has in stock a loss. As the Register noted, because Intel sold its NAND flash business to SK Hynix in 2020 for $9 billion, Optane’s closure means Intel is out of the SSD market entirely.

Read more here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected] or DM @thetomzone on Twitter. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $40 billion. That’s the investment memory-manufacturer Micron is making into building US manufacturing facilities. (PCMag)

Quote: “The CHIPS and Science Act is a once-in-a-generation investment in America itself.”—President Biden, who signed the bill, which includes $52 billion in funding for semiconductor manufacturing (The Verge)

Read: More criminals are using deepfakes to deceive companies during job interviews, but asking suspected deepfake users to turn their face sideways could make it easier to spot them. (ZDNet)

Learn: IT budgets are getting leaner. Gain skills to make data-driven decisions and get the resources your team needs to succeed with the Brew’s Business Analytics Accelerator, starting September 6.