We have seen many e-mail scams, ranging from e-mails that try to steal your information to e-mails that try to infect your computer with malware. In particular one fake e-mail was particularly clever because it used the cover of a real Microsoft e-mail to infect your computer. Now there is another fake e-mail that attempts to take advantage of happenings in the Microsoft world.

A phishing e-mail is floating around with the subject of “Microsoft Windows 8 Team” that tells you “you are a member of the Microsoft window vital user” and tells you that you are eligible to get “the new windows 8 freely and fully protected”. All you need to do to get this “freely and fully protected” Windows 8 is click on the link provided to you in the e-mail, enter your email, username, and password at the page that loads…

…and hit the “Upgrade Account” button. It is as easy as that. Or is it?

As I’m sure you can tell from the poorly worded e-mail, this isn’t really an e-mail from Microsoft and you won’t really get Windows 8 for free by inputting your information at the website that loads. Rather, all you get is a big fat headache because, by submitting your info, you have fallen prey to a phishing attack — expect your account to be compromised soon.

Fortunately, this attack isn’t as sophisticated or as clever as previous attacks. There are many red flags that should warn users as to the lack of legitimacy of this e-mail, such as the poor grammar, a webpage that isn’t on Microsoft’s domain, and the ambiguous form that doesn’t really tell you what account information to enter — just to enter information. To top it off, the scumbags don’t even try to spoof the “from” e-mail address to make it look like from an @microsoft.com e-mail, so it should be very easy to identify the fake e-mail. Although you never know…

[via Sophos]