Search results for: vishing

Sophisticated vishing (voice phishing) attacks continue to target and victimize company call centers and help desks. Recently, a large ad tech company reported that customer information had been compromised as a result of a vishing attack. The company warns that the information obtained in the incident can be used by threat actors to conduct phishing and vishing attacks against customers through the use of emails, texts or telephone numbers.

The attackers, believed to be ShinyHunters (again), use similar tactics in their attacks against companies in all industries. The threat actor, impersonating a company’s information technology employee, calls company employees, (often a help desk or call center), and tricks them into entering credentials and multifactor authentication (MFA) codes on phishing sites that mimic the company’s portal, or asks them to assist the “employee” with changing his or her credentials to access the company network. They also use device code vishing to bypass MFA defenses. Once they have access to the company network, and access to the data the impersonated employee had access to, they often escalate privileges and exfiltrate data to use against the company in an extortion campaign.

These attacks continue to escalate and call centers and help desks are central to thwarting them. Companies may wish to consider immediate additional training and education for in-house call center and help desk personnel, update processes for employees to change credentials through voice requests, implement more robust identification requirements (including using internal company information that only employees would have access to), and conducting tabletop exercises on how to respond to them.

We continue to alert our readers to the uptick and successful use of vishing attacks against companies. Threat actors continue to be creative in developing strategies to use vishing to gain access into systems.

According to Cyberscoop, (a publication that I read religiously), Mandiant has confirmed that “multiple cybercrime groups,” including ShinyHunters, are “combining voice calls and advanced phishing kits to trick victims into handing over access” to company systems. The scary thing about this new wave of vishing attacks is that threat actors are using sophisticated vishing campaigns to compromise single sign on (SSO) credentials, then “enroll threat actor controlled devices into victim multifactor authentication solutions.” This effectively bypasses well-known security tools used by companies to prevent unauthorized access into their systems.

Once threat actors gain access, they move into the company’s SaaS environment to exfiltrate data and then launch extortion campaigns. In addition,

Cybercriminals are registering custom domains that mimic legitimate single sign-on portals used by targeted companies, then deploying tailored voice-phishing kits to call victims while remotely controlling which pages appear in the victim’s browser. This lets the attackers sync their spoken prompts with multifactor-authentication requests in real time, increasing the likelihood the victim approves or enters the needed codes on cue.

In response to these attacks, Okta released threat intelligence confirming that it has seen “multiple phishing kits developed” to use with other SSO and cryptocurrency providers. To be clear, this is not a vulnerability with the SSO products, but a scary way for threat actors to dupe users into providing credentials.  

Due to the success of these new vishing campaigns using SSO, now is the time to remind your users about vishing, how it works, the newest ways threat actors are trying to get users to provide their credentials, and how SSO can give the threat actors the keys to the kingdom.

The recent increase in smishing and vishing schemes is prompting me to remind readers of schemes designed to trick users into providing credentials to perpetrate fraud. We have previously written on phishing, smishing, vishing, and QRishing schemes to increase awareness about these methods of intrusion.

HC3 recently warned the health care sector about vishing schemes designed to impersonate employees in order to access financial systems. See previous blog on this topic here.

The City of New York was recently forced to take its payroll system down for more than a week after a smishing scheme that was designed to steal employees’ pay. The attack targeted the city’s Automated Personnel System Employee Self Service users. The threat actor sent fake text messages with multi-factor authentication to employees with a link to insert their self-service credentials, including usernames, passwords, and copies of driver’s licenses. The scheme was designed to steal the information so the payroll system could be accessed in order to divert payroll to the threat actor’s account. 

Phishing, vishing, smishing, and QRishing continue to be successful ways for threat actors to perpetrate fraud. Applying a healthy dose of paranoia whenever you receive any request for credentials, whether by email, phone, text or through a QR code is warranted and wise.

Phishing, Smishing, Vishing, and QRishing. All of these schemes continue to pose risk to organizations that needs to be assessed and addressed.

Vishing made a strong debut during the pandemic [view related post], and continues to be a scheme that is surprisingly successful.

This week, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management (in the wake of another data breach that was recently settled), notified some of its customers that their accounts were compromised by threat actors impersonating Morgan Stanley employees. According to Morgan Stanley, on February 11, 2022, a threat actor called some of Morgan Stanley’s clients and tricked them into thinking the caller was a Morgan Stanley representative, obtained the customers’ online account information, and gained access to the accounts.

Once that was done, the “bad actor…initiated unauthorized Zelle payments.”

Morgan Stanley disabled the accounts of the customers that were affected by the Vishing scheme and has confirmed that its systems remain secure. It also provided resources to customers on Vishing attacks and how to prevent them.

We have previously alerted you to vishing and smishing schemes [view related post]. A new scheme, using QR codes, is called QRishing or quishing. According to security company Abnormal, between September 15 and October 13, 2021, it identified a new way for hackers to try to get around security measures put in place to keep users from clicking on malicious links or attachments. The phishing campaign they detected was designed to collect Microsoft credentials using QR codes.

According to Abnormal, the threat actors used compromised email accounts to send QR codes that looked like a missed voice mail to users.  Although the threat actors were unsuccessful in getting users to click on the QR code or take a picture of it and send it to their email account in order to click on it, the point is that attackers are getting increasingly more creative and embedding malicious code behind QR codes, which became widely used by restaurants and other establishments during COVID. Many people had never heard of a QR code or used one until COVID hit, and no one seems particularly concerned about taking a picture of a QR code when instructed to do so.

The tip here is to be cautious of QR codes, especially in an email or text, and specifically if someone is asking you to click on it or it is linked to a missed voicemail message. If QR codes are emailed, they might not be detected by the email security system, which is exactly what the attacker has designed it to do so it is delivered to your email box, giving you the chance to click on it and compromise your Outlook credentials. The new mantra is don’t click on suspicious links, attachments, or QR codes.

New dictionary words have been formed to describe online scams. Phishing, one that everyone knows by now, is when a scammer uses a pretext in an email to get someone to click on a link or attachment in the email to deploy malicious malware and ransomware.

Social engineering is when criminals conduct online search of individuals and companies by looking at Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and through Google searches to find out as much as possible about a company and its employees and develop a dossier on the company to launch a phishing, vishing or smishing scam.

Vishing can occur, for example, when a criminal buys a similar domain to a company domain, then adds some security terms to make it look like they are from the IT department of the company and calls an employee, tells them a story about how they need to update the VPN or add additional security measures, sends the employee an email from the fake company email address and while they are on the phone with the employee, convinces the employee to put their user name and password into the pop-up, now allowing the criminal full access to the employee’s account.

And smishing (it’s so new that spell check doesn’t recognize it) is when the scammers use a text (SMS messaging) as the ruse instead of an email or a telephone call.

People tend to trust text messages more than emails. They also read them more frequently and faster than emails. Scammers are using old techniques with new technology to get people to click on embedded links to introduce malicious malware into individuals’ phones or to give up personal or corporate credentials. Now the scam is using text messages.

This should be concerning for IT professionals since so many employees use their personal phones for work. Even though the employees are being targeted on their personal phones, the smishing scams can be a threat to corporate security. IT professionals may wish to add smishing as a technique when providing security training to employees so they are aware of the latest techniques used by criminals.

When the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) get together to issue an alert to warn us about a security threat, you can bet that the threat is real, and that they have seen it used successfully at an alarming rate.

The joint advisory issued on August 20, 2020, “Cyber Criminals Take Advantage of Increased Telework Through Vishing Campaign,” warns companies of the increased use of vishing attacks by cyber criminals. The advisory defines “vishing” as “a form of criminal phone fraud, using social engineering over the telephone system to gain access to private personal and financial information for the purpose of financial reward” [see related Privacy Tip].

People are always amazed at how much time and effort cyber criminals take to get the big pay-off. I always say this is how they make their living. We go to work every day and get a lot of work done in a legal way, while they go to work every day to figure out how to steal from us. They are spending the same amount of time on strategy, development and implementation to work out the details of the crime as we are in making an honest living. What they are doing in cyber crime is no different than planning for a bank robbery. They have to plan carefully and then execute the crime. That’s what the cyber criminals have done with their vishing campaign.

The vishing campaign referred to in the advisory started with the criminals registering domains and creating phishing pages that duplicate a company’s internal VPN (virtual private network) login page, including the requirement for two-factor authentication or a security passcode. They then obtained SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificates for the registered domains, including support(victim company name), ticket(victim company name), employee(victim company name), or (victim company name)support. The point is that they are using the actual company name in combination with IT support to lure the victims and convince them into thinking the domain is real. It certainly looks very real.

The criminals then do online research on potential company victims, and according to the alert, “compile dossiers” on employees of the companies “using mass scraping of public profiles on social media platforms, recruiter and marketing tools, publicly available background check services, and open-source research.” This is publicly-available information about companies and their employees that the criminals use to implement the crime. They aggregate the publicly available information and then start calling the employees on their cell phones. When an employee answers, they engage them in conversation as if they know them (from social engineering—including name, address, position in the company) to get them to believe they are from IT support. They advise the employee that the company has changed the VPN and that a link to the new login will be sent, which includes multi-factor authentication, and that they will need to log in to reset the VPN. During the call, they assist the employee in logging in to the VPN and in the process, they gain access to the employee’s log in credentials and now have access to the employee’s account.

Once in the employee’s account, the criminals have access to other potential victims in the company using the same tactics, and are able to “fraudulently obtain funds using varying methods dependent on the platform being accessed.”

The alert acknowledges that this old scam, previously used on telecommunications and internet service provider employees, has now expanded to all industries because of the transition from work at the office to work from home during the pandemic. Companies need to be aware of the campaign, alert their employees, and provide them with resources and tips to avoid falling victim to it.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recently issued an alert warning the public about vishing campaigns [see related post]. Vishing is defined by the FBI as “a form of criminal phone fraud, using social engineering over the telephone system to gain access to private personal and financial information for the purpose of financial reward.”

Vishing basically means that cyber criminals are gathering publicly-available information on companies and employees so they get to know a lot about them, and then they call employees on their cell phones to try to get them to believe that they are from IT support and that a new VPN (virtual private network) is being used. They then assist the employee with activating the new VPN and in the process obtain the employee’s credentials to access the company’s system and look for new victims.

We all know not to give our credentials to strangers via email. We also know not to give our credentials or personal information to anyone over the telephone. That said, the joint alert makes it clear that people who are working from home are falling victim to this campaign as there is no face-to-face authentication, and the criminals have gathered so much information on the individual employee that the employee believes it is a co-worker calling to assist.

Beware of giving any information to anyone over the telephone (or via email for that matter).

The Alert gives the following “End-User Tips”:

  • Verify that web links do not have misspellings or contain the wrong domain.
  • Bookmark the correct corporate VPN URL and do not visit alternative URLs on the sole basis  of an inbound phone call.
  • Be suspicious of unsolicited phone calls, visits, or email messages from unknown individuals claiming to be from a legitimate organization. Do not provide personal information or information about your organization, including its structure or networks, unless you are certain of a person’s authority to have the information. If possible, try to verify the caller’s identity directly with the company.
  • If you receive a vishing call, document the phone number of the caller as well as the domain that the actor tried to send you to and relay this information to law enforcement.
  • Limit the amount of personal information you post on social networking sites. The internet is a public resource; only post information you are comfortable with anyone seeing.
  • Evaluate your settings: sites may change their options periodically, so review your security and privacy settings regularly to make sure that your choices are still appropriate.

For more information on how to stay safe on social networking sites and avoid social engineering and phishing attacks, refer to the CISA Security Tips below.

ShinyHunters continues to wreak havoc against well-known brands; most recently, Wynn Resorts. Wynn Resorts has confirmed that “an unauthorized third party acquired certain employee data.” It is believed that the threat actor was ShinyHunters. Fortunately for Wynn, the incident is not affecting its operations, and its resorts remain fully functional.

ShinyHunters announced it was the culprit on its leak site on February 20, 2026. It alleges that it stole more than 800,000 records, including Social Security numbers. Wynn was removed from the site four days later, and reported that “the unauthorized third party has stated that the stolen data has been deleted.”

Wynn has confirmed that it will be offering credit monitoring and identity protection services to affected employees.

Wynn is not alone in being a target of ShinyHunters. It is reported that over 100 organizations have been successfully attacked through vishing attacks and compromised single sign on credentials by ShinyHunters.

The techniques used by ShinyHunters and other threat actors using vishing campaigns are relevant and provide strong current scenarios to warn employees through education and training, and to use for cybersecurity tabletop exercises.

Security professionals rely on the implementation of multifactor authentication (MFA) to defend against phishing attacks and intrusions. Unfortunately, we can’t completely rely on MFA to protect us as threat actors (more specifically, ShinyHunters) are now targeting companies in technology, financial services, real estate, energy, healthcare, logistics, and retail with synchronized vishing-phishing attacks.

The newest attacks involve the threat actors pretending to be IT staff who called employees to tell them that the company was updating MFA settings. While on the phone with the employee, the threat actor directed them to a malicious credential harvesting site that spoofed the company to capture the employees’ single sign on credentials and MFA codes, then registered their device for the MFA push.

The threat actors cover their tracks and bypass security notices. Once they gain access to the company system, they download sensitive data and extort ransoms from companies and harass employees.

It is crucial that companies continue to educate employees on the newest cybersecurity threats and schemes so they can identify them and prevent themselves from becoming victims. The use of sophisticated vishing and phishing schemes like the one described above are unusual and many users don’t understand how combining vishing and phishing can be very powerful and successful. Incorporate these recent threats into your next cybersecurity training or company-wide cyber tip.