A phishing scam using the name and image of the judicial platform Citius is circulating via email, as warned today by the Office of the Prosecutor General. The fraudulent emails are crafted to make recipients believe they are from a “Portuguese Judicial Court” regarding a pending case in the Court of the District of Lisbon North.
The email, falsely signed by a purported “Dr. Miguel Silva, Prosecutor of the Public Ministry,” claims to notify recipients of a judicial decision and asks them to open attached ‘PDF’ files containing unintelligible content. Opening these files redirects victims to websites hosted on servers in Eastern Europe, the Public Ministry (MP) warns.
“These messages are fraudulent. They do not originate from any court and are not issued by the Citius platform or any authorized entity or server. Their origin is an email server in the cloud, registered for less than a week, and does not belong to the courts,” the MP stated.
The MP further mentions that victims are sometimes asked to confirm they are human by clicking a button, which leads to the installation of malicious software on their devices, allowing criminals remote access to their contents.
“This is, therefore, a ‘credential harvesting’ campaign: usernames, passwords, or other online authentication information. Messages as described above should be ignored and deleted without response,” the MP cautioned.
