Scammers continue to get creative when it comes to current events - and this new scam is no exception.
Fraudsters are impersonating Viktor Zubkov, a close ally to Vladimir Putin with a fake email. Zubkov, who served as the 36th Prime Minister of Russia in 2007-2008, and Putin's First Deputy Prime Minister during the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, is also a board member of Gazprom, a state-owned energy giant.
This type of "advance fee Nigerian Prince scam" exploits a fake opportunity to get rich quick, supposedly made possible by international sanctions on Russia. Here's an example screenshot of the email:
Source: Cybernews
Victims agree to share their accounts with the cybercriminals so "money can be transferred", and/or are being asked to pay a small sum so that they will get this large amount transferred to their account. The reality is that their bank account is drained and their private information is stolen.
If you're a KnowBe4 customer, we created this template for you to use:
This feature uses data from KnowBe4’s Artificial Intelligence Driven Agent (AIDA) to select the most relevant and challenging template for each user. AIDA Selected templates are chosen based on a user’s training history, phishing events, and performance metrics, such as their Phish-prone percentage and Security Awareness Proficiency Assessment (SAPA) results. The more data AIDA has, the better it works, so we recommend using these templates for users who have some prior training or phishing history. More at Support:
https://support.knowbe4.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500003848062-Automated-Template-Selection
New-school security awareness training will make sure that your users are able to spot a suspicious phishing email leverages any recent current event. Let's stay safe out there!
Cybernews has the full story.
