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Bristol Post
Bristol Post
World
James Rodger & Evie Coffey

Google and Microsoft Outlook users issued with 'red alert' scam warning

Following a 240% increase in email scams, a "red alert" warning has been sent to billions of Google and Microsoft Outlook users. According to the cyber defence company BlueVoyant, phishing attacks can be challenging to notice.

Dynamic phishing scams have prompted a warning from BlueVoyant, Birmingham Live reports. Their report said: "One of the more complicated ways threat actors evade detection involves multiple redirect paths, steering consumers to spoofed domains while redirecting presumed threat hunters or phishing analysts to an error page."

The report added: "These evasion mechanisms include User Agent or IP restrictions and blocklisting, with significant emphasis placed on bot and crawler detection. The purpose of this type of redirection is to hide the phishing content on a single website by diverting threat hunters elsewhere, i.e. the target's official domain, a google search, etc.

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“Dynamic DNS hosting providers are particularly popular among threat actors because they provide a convenient platform to easily set up and host multiple phishing pages without having to register a domain,” the researchers write. “BlueVoyant has been tracking phishing activity leveraging this infrastructure since 2021, and found that 67% of all phishing attacks were hosted on dynamic DNS infrastructure by the end of that year, demonstrating the infrastructure’s quick adoption and massive scale of use.”

BlueVoyant has also observed a steady increase in SMS phishing. "To carry out a successful smishing attack, threat actors require an automated tool that can send SMS messages in bulk,” the report says. “SMS gateway scripts are sold on the deep and dark web as all-inclusive solutions, which are rather easy to operate, and require very little technical knowledge.”

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