A new technique used by spear-phishing campaigns has been identified by security company Avanan. The technique leverages a feature in all of the applications in the popular office collaboration suite offered by Google. By using a comment on a document the attacker creates, the hacker can include the name of the victim with an “@” symbol. The victim then receives a legitimate email from Google with the entire malicious comment included in the body. This allows the attacker to attempt to make the attack more trustworthy as it appears to be coming from a legitimate source. They can also impersonate a coworker by creating a Gmail account using the name of a victim’s colleague to create an additional layer of deception. Avanan has detected a “new, massive wave of attackers” who are currently exploiting this feature in the wild. CTIX analysts are investigating the nature of these attackers and will provide updates if new information arises.