Millions of people who Gmail or Microsoft Outlook have been warned after report of a 240 per cent rise in scams. Cyber defence company BlueVoyant has warned of the dangers of phishing scams, which it has warned are hard to spot.
Experts at the firm have produced a report about dynamic phishing, a technique which redirects researchers and bots away from the scam content and on to an apparently safer link. This method allows the scammers to operate undetected.
BlueVoyant 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.
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"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% 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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