Security News > 2020 > October > Silent Librarian Goes Back to School with Global Research-Stealing Effort

The Silent Librarian campaign has re-emerged for the fall school session, actively targeting students and faculty at universities via spear-phishing campaigns.

The goal is to harvest not just logins to sell online, but also proprietary university research and data, researchers said.

Targets stretch across a dozen countries and so far have included: The University of Adelaide in Australia; Glasgow Caledonian, University of Kent, University of York, King's College London, Cambridge and others in the U.K.; the University of Toronto and McGill in Canada; and Stony Brook University, University of North Texas and others in the U.S. The modus operandi seen last year remains in place, with Silent Librarian hosting a series of phishing sites that are built to mimic legitimate university domains.

Emails purporting to be from the University of Adelaide Library directed victims to a "Library.adelaide.crev[dot]me" URL, which is very close to the legitimate "Library.adelaide.edu.au" domain of the school.

In March 2018, nine Iranians were indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for conducting attacks against universities and other organizations with the goal of stealing research and proprietary data.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/silent-librarian-school-research-stealing/160099/