Security News > 2020 > February > Charming Kitten Uses Fake Interview Requests to Target Public Figures

The Iran-based hacking group Charming Kitten has resurfaced with a new campaign that uses fake interviews to target public figures to launch phishing attacks and steal victims' email-account information.

Certfa-who has been tracking the group since 2018-also observed Charming Kitten in the process of designing a malware for Windows machines, though it's currently unknown who it will target and how grand the scope will be, researchers wrote.

"Our research indicates the Charming Kitten is still trying to target private and government institutions, think tanks and academic institutions, organizations with ties to the Baha'i community, and many others in European countries, the United States, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, to extract information from them," they wrote in the report.

The latest campaign has several stages, the first of which shows Charming Kitten posing as a former Wall Street Journal journalist and emailing a victim to ask for an interview in an effort to gain trust.

In addition to the target and the style of the campaign, this use of phishing kits and the "Two-step-checkup[.]site" method of managing and sending HTTP requests also are footprints of a Charming Kitten-styled attack, according to Certfa, whose researchers have observed the Iranian group using these tactics before in previous activity.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/charming-kitten-uses-fake-interview-requests-to-target-public-figures/152628/