Pierluigi Paganini
June 21, 2015
Every day scammers propose new techniques to steal personal information and other sensitive data. Today we will speak of a new social engineering technique used in the wild by crooks that allow them to hack into an email account by simply knowing the victim’s phone number.
Security experts at Symantec are warning people about a new password recovery scam that tricks users into giving attackers the control over their webmail account. All an attacker needs to take over a webmail account is the victim’s email address and cell phone number.
“The cybercriminals carrying out these attacks do not seem to be focused on financial gain such as stealing credit card numbers. They appear to be looking to gather information about their targets and are not targeting users en masse, instead going for specific individuals. The way they operate is similar to the methods used by APT groups.” states Symantec.
Symantec published a video explanation of how this social technique works:
Let’s analyze the attack scenario:
The users have several options to retrieve their forgotten credentials including “Enter the last password you remember” and “Confirm password reset on my [MAKE AND MODEL] phone.” The attacker can choose “Get a verification code on my phone: [MOBILE PHONE NUMBER].”“Legitimate messages from password recovery services will only tell you the verification code and will not ask you to respond in any way.” explains Symantec.
Since the password recovery process is almost similar to several mail services, this new password recovery scam could be used to hack into a number of popular webmail services including Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.
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(Security Affairs – cybercrime, password recovery scam)
