Phishing attacks continue to rise at alarming levels and continue to infect social media platforms like ghouls haunting abandoned houses or, well, a virus. At any rate, social media platforms have their work cut out as well, considering how vast their user bases are. A few thousand individuals are manageable with a large enough team. Over 100,000 monthly users, and we’ve suddenly gotten ourselves the recipe for certain cybersecurity disasters. It’s why the likes of Facebook and Twitter had such difficulty in monitoring misinformation spreads across their platforms during the 2020 pandemic and lockdown period.
Social media platforms have also evolved to the point where they’re no longer just elaborate chatrooms with the occasional special feature. They’re comprehensive databases that harbor a metric ton worth of private user information. Phishing actors often conduct deep dives across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to gleam phone numbers, addresses, and credit card numbers off of specific accounts. Telegram even had entire private groups dedicated to black markets being set up where such information would be sold.
So, what’s the current phishing nightmare that social media sites are attempting to deal with? It all starts with an adorably named phishing campaign by the moniker of “Ducktail”. Doesn’t that just remind you of the popular Disney series starring Huey, Dewey, and Louie instead of, well, real-life criminals? The campaign is being conducted by either a singular threat actor or an entire troupe of them, originating from Vietnam. This information was compiled by and commented upon by cybersecurity firm WithSecure; the platform even states that these attacks have been ongoing since at least the end of 2021 December.
With an approach that seems sober and innocuous enough for LinkedIn, the phishing attack was carried out via a PDF file that contained hidden malware. Downloading the file opened the floodgates to informational exposure; threat actors could harvest 2FA codes, IP addresses, addresses, birthdays, numbers, and user IDs. Associated Facebook Business accounts were also exposed in the process, leaving users vulnerable on multiple fronts.
The easy methods of avoiding such attacks would be to carefully download sent files, and also keep scanning new files with malware detectors and whatnot.
Read next: The Google Play Store Is Harboring Malware-Containing Android Applications That Have Been Downloaded Thousands Of Times
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World
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