Displaying items by tag: Social Engineering

When I started DecryptedTech it was to counter all the crap marketing I saw from component makers. I wanted to prove people with a clean and simple way of understanding what a product could and could not do. I also wanted to counter the massive amounts of FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) that was thrown around from different players in that industry. When I stepped away from the PC component market and began covering the industry I worked in (cybersecurity) I continued this, but only in a narrow way. I did not cover the horrible marketing and FUD efforts that I saw on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (now X). Well… now, things have changed. I am not going to just watch the shit marketing and FUD get pushed around so, to quote John Wick, Yeah, I guess I am back. I will be diving into a recent misuse of X Premium in a marketing effort on behalf of a few major studios. (I will get to gaming, cybersecurity, and other FUD as well).

Social engineering efforts via voice calls (Vishing) is nothing new. The use of phone calls for malicious activity is pretty old and include such popular scams as extended car warranties, IRS collection attempts, and the ever popular “there is a complaint against you”. These are just a few of the consumer scams that have been in play and are still in play. On the corporate side there are even more which target general employees and support personnel to either gain entry or enable some form of financial fraud. Sadly, this pivot is also seriously under managed by most organizations, with few providing any preventative training and most not testing this attack vector to determine exposure.

You have to love Microsoft Teams. Teams is the Frankenstein Monster of Microsoft’s Lync, which then became Skype for Business, and then morphed into the problematic service we now know as Teams. The journey from Lync to Teams has been a mishmash of features added in and removed while trying to maintain the semblance of feature parity with the products that came before it. One of the big pushes for teams was the integration of SharePoint for file storage and collection. SharePoint integration has been and continues to be a HUGE push from Microsoft in all of their MS365 products and it is not always for the better.

Over the weekend news surfaced that indicated users of Trezor hardware crypto wallets had received emails claiming Trezor had been breached and urging the user to reset their PIN as soon as possible. The emails turned out to be a phishing campaign that leveraged the compromise of MailChimp marketing tools. The latter was confirmed by MailChimp on Sunday after Trezor made the statement following the large number of reports on the phishing emails.

Def Con 25, Las Vegas, NV –
Your phone rings and you check the number as a precaution against marketing calls and it looks like it is from your office. The voice on the other end says that there is an issue on the network and they need your assistance to troubleshoot. The person is calm, friendly and helpful so you agree to assist. By the time it is all done you have in advertently given away vital information about your network to a potential attacker.

One cool thing about working in IT is that things are very predictable. You generally know how a system or application will react if you do this or that to it. This is how people find and use exploits in software and even hardware. You look at how an application works and identify ways you can use those processes against it. It is like digital judo. However, what many people do not really get is that this also works when setting up a larger organization for an attack. If you can track how they will respond to a particular threat, you can use it against them in very interesting ways.

It seems that LinkedIn cannot catch a break. After a rather large data breach that resulted in the theft of a large number of user account information (including unsalted passwords protected by an outdated encryption scheme) there is now a new phishing email making the rounds that is aimed specifically at LinkedIn users.  Although phishing emails that target users of social networks are nothing new this one is the first that we have seen that targets LinkedIn users and also appears to be sent directly to LinkedIn user email addresses.

Leveraging the hype around the 2012 Olympics in London cyber criminals are pushing out malware via spam emails claiming that Gabrielle Douglas, who won a gold medal in Women's  Gymnastics All Around, will face lifetime ban from sport.  Obviously they are expecting that false news about doping scandals will help a lot in spreading the malware. The email is suggesting a link that will open up a false youtube page and prompt you to download  Adobe Flash plugin to view the content. Sophos, which first reported on this spam, detects the malware as Troj/Agent-XIK and Troj/JSRedir-IA.

Remember the Faceboook malware we warned you about? You remember the one that relied on the fact that people love to see pictures of themselves on the internet? Well it looks like either the same group that was behind that malware or another equally clever group has moved from Faceboook to Twitter. We have heard multiple reports of tweets showing up that claim to have a link to a picture of the user. Unfortunately due to the widespread use of shortened links it is hard to spot many malicious payloads. Fortunately in this case you can identify the bad link by the .ru at the end… for now.

If you have been around computers for long you might remember the “I Love You” malware or the Nimda malware. Both of these relied on our habits of opening up links and attachments without out considering the email or subject. What made Nimda and I Love You even more dangerous is that they came from people we know. Now it looks like there is a new Facebook malware running around the internet. The new malware that was caught by Sophos Labs takes advantage of user trust of links claiming to have posts about them. It is an often used form of social engineering that has been effective ever since some of the first Spam malware hit the net.