Email apparently from Home Office warns of emails apparently from Home Office

Trust us: Don't trust us

The Home Office has sent unsolicited emails to the public, warning that the Home Office will never send unsolicited emails to the public, and will not ask for personal information or passwords in an email.

The lay-off happy government department warned the public to be wary of emails that appear to come from the Ministry of Justice or the Home Office.

Files attached to those spam emails contain the TorrentLocker ransomware which will attempt to encrypt all files on the infected machine or server and request a ransom for decryption, usually to be paid in Bitcoin.

The warning comes after a similar series of phishing emails were detected from a group passing itself off as Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs.

this is relatively well done spam/trojan… pic.twitter.com/R2QNOGqpAs

— Sam (@smithsam) July 22, 2015

Reg readers know full well not to open attachments in emails they deem suspicious and not to reply to emails soliciting personal information. ®