Jerome Segura, a senior security researcher over at our friends at Malwarebytes reported about a new, in-the-wild tech support scam that has moved from Amazon Web Services to Rackspace's managed cloud network. What it does is spread alarming popups ads that claim a site is infected and to click on the ad for help.
Segura warned that this Amazon/Rackspace support scam is particularly tough for Infosec people to recognize because it is more advanced than normal. He said: “Some differences include caution to use anonymizer services, disabling Google indexing, and HTML code obfuscation of the scam page. In addition, the crooks managing these campaigns rely on those cloud services to frequently rotate IP addresses and point them to countless different domains and sub-domains,” Segura told SCMagazine.com in an email Wednesday.
Not only are security pros given fits by this scam, but the general public is also more susceptible because they run directly in the browser and prey on people's well-founded computer security fears by displaying fake warnings.
“What makes it even more effective is the fact that the scam page triggers a continuous series of pop up alerts preventing the user from closing the page. Out of desperation, users may end up calling the toll free number to get the situation resolved,” Segura said.
The next step has the victim being told by someone posing as a tech support person from a major company that for a fee they will fix the problem. Microsoft estimates that about 3.3 million people have fallen victim to scammers in 2015 and have paid out more than $1.5 billion to the perpetrators.
Segura said Malwarebytes has reported the campaign to Rackspace for takedown and will continue tracking it to see where it goes next. Here is more technical background detail.
It is obvious that employees which have stepped through effective security awareness training will not fall for social engineering tricks like this. Find out how affordable this is for your organization and be pleasantly surprised.
Related Pages: Social Engineering
