Cybersecurity researchers have recently discovered an incredibly simple phishing campaign that seems to be performing exceptionally well.
In a blog post, experts from Cofense described a newly found phishing campaign in which threat actors impersonate a car insurance company. The body of the emails is short and to the point, and doesn’t distribute anything particularly malicious. In fact, in many cases, it carried a Google Ad link, which is probably why it managed to bypass secure email gateways (SEG) and land in people’s inboxes in the first place.
In the email, the victims are told that they are eligible for up to 10% of the latest value of their car, annually. What’s more, if they owned the car for multiple years, they are entitled to all previous payouts, too. Given the current economic situation around the world, the promise of money is as interesting as ever, the researchers added.
Hijacking a legitimate website
To learn more, the victims are offered a link to the blawx[.]com website. This site used to be legitimate in the past, but was most likely recently compromised and repurposed for this campaign. This site claims to offer downloadable “instructions” on how to claim the funds, but the downloaded file is just a JavaScript that, down the road, deploys the NetSupport Remote Access Trojan (RAT) to the device.
NetSupport Manager, from which the RAT was built, is a genuine application designed for remote access, and used by technical support technicians for more than 20 years now. In the meantime, it was hijacked and misappropriated by hackers who use it to gain unauthorized access to target endpoints.
We don’t know how many people were targeted, or how many fell for the ruse, but Cofense did describe the campaign as “relatively small”.
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