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We should all be worried. Could not load tags. Latest commit. Git stats commits. Failed to load latest commit information. Update sans. Sep 7, Update uses. Nov 27, Update html. Update ac. Update req. Mar 31, Update AdvPhishing. The variations out there are truly staggering and committed hackers often make a living out of constantly innovating to deceive.
However, all phishing scams have some common characteristics and can be broadly classified based on target audience, delivery channel and exploit tactic. Email — A vast majority of phishing scams are delivered via email. Mobile — With smartphone adoption surging to new highs in recent years, sophisticated hackers have started targeting mobile phones for sending out highly targeted phishing attacks.
Message containing a link that leads to a fake site that harvests sensitive data. By understanding the characteristics common to most phishing scams and then reviewing some commonly observed examples, end-users can develop highly effective phishing identification, prevention and mitigation approaches for safely using their favorite digital channels.
In the sections below, we provide some known scams reported for both email and mobile phishing. Phishing emails remain one of the most prevalent methods that hackers try to compromise sensitive information. Some common examples of phishing email scams are listed below. With over million PayPal accounts globally, PayPal remains a poster boy of email phishing with scammers and cyber criminals putting in inordinate creativity to dupe unsuspecting users by spoofing the PayPal brand.
Some common types of PayPal phishing emails include —. When a new account is opened, PayPal requires that the email be verified. A scammer could send a legitimate looking email which contains a link to verify the account. The target of this link would typically be a site that looks like PayPal but on closer scrutiny, could well turn out to be a scam to collect PayPal credentials.
PayPal typically restricts the dollar volume of transactions for most of its members. When these limits are exceeded, accounts are put on hold while PayPal requests and processed additional information. A common scam is to send such a notice to unsuspecting users. The from name in email appears to be from PayPal domain although the real SMTP sender is different and the text typically contains a link to remove account limitations.
Clicking on this link takes the user to a site which looks like PayPal and requires you to log in to proceed. PayPal requires users to setup bank accounts in order to receive funds. A user may get an email containing links that ask him to confirm bank account.
PayPal requires users to manually accept payments before they can be transferred into their bank account. User gets an email confirming receipt of some payment for an item and which must be accepted in order to receive the actual credit.
The email may contain a variety of links such as to confirm payment acceptance, view transaction details or simply log in. All these links typically lead to a site that looks like PayPal but is in fact used by a scam artist to capture PayPal login information.
User gets an email that an automated payment was sent from his account for a purchase that he most likely never made. The email looks like a legitimate receipt copy of actual receipts that PayPal sends as receipt of payment and contains a link to cancel the payment if this payment was made in error or contact customer service.
The target site asks the user to login before cancelling or submitting a support ticket and ends up stealing the login credentials. Instead of attempting to download any links in such emails, or acting on messages that they contain, users should report phishing to PayPal. This can be done by forwarding the entire message to spoof paypal. Such emails appear to originate from one of the major credit card companies and typically contain notification of serious actions including but not limited to:.
Hackers use alarming typography and near perfect duplication of branding from the original company to send out these emails and which contain links to rectify the situation. Clicking on the link redirects the user to a phony site designed specifically to capture account information.
Dropbox is a popular online file sharing service used by millions of users worldwide and the sheer scale of its adoption has made it highly susceptible to abuse by skilled hackers. Two types of scams are commonly observed. This takes the form of an email apparently from Dropbox and which asks you to view a file that another user shared.
Clicking on this link redirects to a fake site that simply collects your Drobox account credentials. The hacker could than transfer malware to your online account and which when downloaded to local hard-drive, could significantly compromise personal information from local files, downloads and browsing history.
In this example, a hacker could upload malware onto his account and then share this with you. Unlike the previous instance, this email will actually be from Dropbox but clicking on the download link will simply download malware to your local computer.
A best-practice in all cases of Dropbox phishing emails is to never open a link from someone you do not know. Not only should you ensure that any links point to a valid Dropbox account, but also that you are able to inspect any files to be downloaded before you actually bring them home.
Like Dropbox, OneDrive is an online file storage and sharing platform that is heavily used by Microsoft users, especially in corporate environments. With such a huge install-base, hackers can literally hit gold if they can somehow get users to click on unsuspecting links that involve downloading a file, but which end up either installing malware, or stealing the login credentials by redirecting to fake, account harvesting sites.
A very common example of a Verizon phishing email is when a user gets a notification about pending disconnection due to unpaid bills. While false credit card usage charges may be disputed relatively easily, it is far more difficult to deal with identity theft that results from a scammer knowing your personal details.
This type of scam is more common in corporate environments. With this information, a scammer can impersonate as a Vendor and send an email to a Client. The Client user knows the Vendor rep by name, recognizes the contact details, and also the signature address.
The Vendor politely reminds the Client about a pending invoice which will carry a surcharge if not cleared soon and which may also result in service interruption. The unsuspecting client readily follows the link and makes a wire payment without realizing that the email was actually from vendor xyzcompony. While less common than some of the other phishing email scams , wire transfer phishing scams can often result in substantial and irrecoverable financial loss especially if payments are sent abroad and to companies registered under foreign jurisdictions.
With over 2 billion monthly active users , Facebook remains one of the top social media platforms for phishing. Imagine receiving a genuine Facebook message from one of your connections to click on a link. Chances are that you will click without thinking twice.
After all, the message is genuinely from one of your connections on Facebook. The only problem is that this message was not sent intentionally and is in fact, a phishing email sent from a compromised account. You click on the link and become host to malware e. Following are some examples routinely reported by users in the Facebook security community.
As hackers get more creative, more such emails would flow through. Facebook has morphed into much more than just a social networking site and now allows users to login to other sites using Facebook and even to make payments via its platform.
The impact of an identity theft on this platform could potentially be disastrous. Never click on any link in any Facebook email and always login directly into Facebook to check the issue. If there has been a genuine breach of security or some other policy violation, it is likely that you will not be allowed to log in.
When it comes to using mobile phones, phishing is commonly implemented in three forms —. A scammer can create a lookalike of a popular app and then program it to capture sensitive information such as username, password, social security number of bank account details.
The attacker can then distribute the malicious app through various stores so that it can be installed by unsuspecting users. Examples could include-. Many popular apps deliver content using internal browsers. A skilled scammer can easily launch man-in-the-middle attacks to modify the content show and capture sensitive information. So, what is a phishing text message? It is a type of phishing scam when attackers send phishing SMS Short Message Service in an attempt to lure the recipient into providing personal or financial information.
This would be an SMS that attempts to create alarm e. Never click on such links or reply to these texts as this could easily result in malware in being installed on your cell phone.
Business email compromise BEC is a type of phishing attack where a scammer sends out an email using the account of a senior executive most often as the CEO and attempts to get the target typically internal to the company to transfer funds or other sensitive information.
BEC attacks, unlike normal phishing attacks are highly targeted and involve a lot of planning and use of social engineering techniques on part of the scammer to create legitimate sounding spoof emails. Given the highly personalized nature of BEC attacks, and the fact that they rarely involve use of malware, such attacks can easily bypass commodity anti-virus software and other threat protection tools and cause crippling damages.
To be honest, they look like an email where the Display Name is the name of a top executive, but the email address is not at the domain of the company. Notice that the domain name is different, co vs. Almost all BEC attacks can be broadly classified into following five stereotypes based on the IC3 complaints mentioned above —.
In this type of attack, a business that has a longstanding relationship with a vendor receives an email asking to pay out an invoice to an alternative account to the one normally used.
The email is well disguised in terms of branding and look and feel and sent out from an account that is normally known to the recipient.
This is similar to email spoofing in invoice fraud except that the phishing email comes from a hacked account. There is no malware etc. Given the amount of research that has gone into this targeting, the reason Y is typically very convincing and legitimate.
This type of attack involves emails coming out from attorneys or law firms who ask for payment on behalf of their clients in lieu of settling disputes.
This type of attack typically targets HR or Finance departments in an attempt to steal employee data which can then be used to compromise individual accounts, or identity theft. Whether the phishing email involves impersonation or account compromise, BEC attacks are very hard to identify and prevent given that they do not involve downloading any malware or ask the targets to visit fake sites. CEO fraud is a special type of phishing email that impersonates senior company executives most often the CEO and issues requests to some other staff member to make payments or share other sensitive corporate data.
This impersonation can happen both via email spoofing and account hacking. Whereas spoofing involves an attacker sending out an email that looks to be from the CEO, the email actually originates from some other domain or company.
In account hacking, the attacker manages to compromise the CEO email credentials and sends out payment requests through the actual account. This involves details such as contact name, departments that he directly controls, people who are authorized to make payments in that company, and information about key projects and vendors. Traditional anti-phishing technologies have two key components.
In both cases, these tools rely on historical data about spam links and malware to take corrective action. However, launching a new phishing site is a trivial matter that can be accomplished within an hour in most cases. Also, scammers routinely develop new forms of malware and it typically takes a minimum of 48 hrs. These are called zero-day phishing attacks and require advanced, real-time attack monitoring, identification and prevention capabilities.
Different products offer different coverage and depth of threat identification ranging from monitoring of Microsoft macros, checking embedded code in HTML emails, inspecting hidden JavaScript files, and monitoring infected PDFs or other attachments. At a conceptual level, all these features can be broadly classified into two categories —.
In many cases, advanced machine learning techniques are used to verify if an email is a forgery by inspecting key elements such as subject line, font sizes and styling, paragraph formatting , monitoring the text for grammatical and punctuation errors or even its tone, identifying non-existent sender addresses and so on.
Most of these tasks are practically impossible for a casual reader to do, without spending an inordinate amount of time analyzing every email. Advanced software can actually simulate user behavior around what happens when an email link is clicked.
Links are automatically flagged if clicking on them results in known symptoms of phishing. This means that even newly registered links that are not yet present in any blacklist or database can be flagged before they cause harm. Given the stakes involved in spear and whale phishing attacks , scammers go to great lengths in designing innovative scam campaigns that can have devastating effect if successful. User education and awareness is necessary but not enough and organizations must also consider deploying such highly specialized, purpose-built email security solutions that are designed for multi-dimensional threat protection including preventing zero-day attacks.
Whale phishing is a term used to describe phishing attacks that are targeted specifically at wealthy, powerful and prominent individuals such as C-level staff in corporates , high ranking public officials, and senior government ministers. While successful whale phishing attempts have been reported for all categories of senior officials above, they are most prevalent in the corporate world and hence, also referred to as CEO fraud.
Almost all whale phishing attacks share the same blueprint. The victim receives an email from a high ranking, senior individual asking him to perform a high-value action such as initiate a wire transfer, carry out some financial transaction, or share information that is normally tightly access-controlled.
These attacks may also involve asking the victim to visit spoofed sites that are actually designed for harvesting information or or opening a password protected PDF file that may contain malware. Since the request comes from a person of authority and is usually well disguised, it carries a sense of authority and urgency that compels the victim to act. Given the potentially high returns in whale phishing, attackers go to great lengths to create highly targeted and personalized emails.
These could entail details such as name, job title, date of joining, names of people working in a particular department or even the travel schedule of the CEO. Once a target has been identified, getting his email using his LinkedIn profile name and company domain name is a trivial scraping matter and many prospecting tools exist that specialize in such email harvesting.
Once the email is known both for the senior official and his staff, attackers could easily create visual look-alikes of logo, signature etc.
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