An SMS phishing (smishing) campaign is impersonating utility providers in the US, Cybernews reports. Researchers at Enea AdaptiveMobile Security spotted the campaign, which informs recipients of offers to save money. The text messages contain offers related to gas prices, electricity bills, concert tickets, car insurance policies. If a user clicks the link, they’ll be taken to a website designed to steal their personal and financial information.
“[T]hese attackers know their target’s weak spot, and have constructed a special, ‘too good to miss’ offer to hook the victim,” the researchers write. “Once the user has opened the URL in the message and engages with the website, the risk of information theft is imminent. This could mean the user’s Social Security Number, or their credit/debit card PIN, for example.”
The researchers note that the scammers behind these campaigns are frequently organized groups that operate like legitimate businesses.
“One might envision these spammers as unstructured gangs, sending out blanket messages in the hopes of reaching the right targets and getting them to engage,” the researchers write. “The reality is that these are highly motivated and organized entities. They make their living based on revenues from these activities. They have techniques, procedures and even schedules to ‘work.’”
The operators of this campaign have taken measures to avoid being flagged as spam.
“In the case of these messages, we have identified groups of spammers who have been using a network in an alternative destination to target subscribers, avoiding detection on a particular operator's network in the US which has spam protection in place,” the researchers write. “The operators we have observed as being a source of this kind of malicious traffic are selected by spammers due to the low cost of interconnection messages, and because SIM cards are easy to get.”
New-school security awareness training can enable your employees to thwart these types of attacks by teaching them how to recognize social engineering attacks.
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