Security News
A new phishing campaign has been targeting verified Twitter accounts, as seen by BleepingComputer. The phishing campaign follows Twitter's recent removal of the checkmarks from a number of verified accounts, citing that these were ineligible for the legendary status, and were verified in error.
The global pandemic has provided cover for all sorts of phishing scams over the past couple of years, and the rise in alarm over the spread of the latest COVID-19 variant, Omicron, is no exception. U.K. consumer watchdog "Which?" has raised the alarm that a new phishing scam, doctored up to look like official communications from the National Health Service, is targeting people with fraud offers for free PCR tests for the COVID-19 Omicron variant.
Research conducted by Egress and Orpheus Cyber has revealed a surge in phishing kits imitating major brands in the lead up to Black Friday, as security experts warn that cybercriminals are stepping up their phishing attacks over the holiday shopping season. Amazon was a popular choice for cybercriminals, with a 334.1% increase in phishing kits impersonating the brand ahead of its anticipated Black Friday promotions.
Phishing actors have quickly started to exploit the emergence of the Omicron COVID-19 variant and now use it as a lure in their malicious email campaigns. Threat actors are quick to adjust to the latest trends and hot topics, and increasing people's fears is an excellent way to cause people to rush to open an email without first thinking it through.
Socially engineered SMS messages are being used to install malware on Android devices as part of a widespread phishing campaign that impersonates the Iranian government and social security services to make away with credit card details and steal funds from victims' bank accounts. "The malicious application not only collects the victim's credit card numbers, but also gains access to their 2FA authentication SMS, and turn[s] the victim's device into a bot capable of spreading similar phishing SMS to other potential victims," Check Point researcher Shmuel Cohen said in a new report published Wednesday.
Malicious emails can be used to reach many targets with relative ease, and criminals can purchase ready-made phishing kits that bundle together everything they need for a lucrative campaign. After analyzing three months of phishing email traffic, we found that most attacks follow the money to either big tech or leading financial firms.
Three different state-sponsored threat actors aligned with China, India, and Russia have been observed adopting a new method called RTF template injection as part of their phishing campaigns to deliver malware to targeted systems. "RTF template injection is a novel technique that is ideal for malicious phishing attachments because it is simple and allows threat actors to retrieve malicious content from a remote URL using an RTF file," Proofpoint researchers said in a new report shared with The Hacker News.
Three APT hacking groups from India, Russia, and China, were observed using a novel RTF template injection technique in their recent phishing campaigns. Researchers at Proofpoint spotted the first cases of weaponized RTF template injection in March 2021, and since then, actors have been steadily optimizing the technique.
An APWG's report reveals that it saw 260,642 phishing attacks in July 2021 - the highest monthly total observed since APWG began its reporting program in 2004. Overall, the number of phishing attacks has doubled from early 2020.
The TrickBot malware operators have been using a new method to check the screen resolution of a victim system to evade detection of security software and analysis by researchers. Last year, the TrickBot gang added a new feature to their malware that terminated the infection chain if a device was using non-standard screen resolutions of 800x600 and 1024x768.