A 'red alert' warning has been issued to billions of Gmail and Microsoft Outlook users, as scams are on the rise. There has reportedly been a 240 per cent rise in email phishing scams recently, and according to cyber defence company BlueVoyant, they can be tricky to identify.
To help people who may be unsure what a scam email looks like, experts from the company have outlined a couple of typical warning signs as well as explaining why they are actually dangerous, Birmingham Live reports.
The security experts have issued a warning over dynamic phishing in a report that explains: "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.
"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."
“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 per cent 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 noted that there's been a steady increase in SMS phishing recently.
"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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