APWG: Phishing Continues to Rise, Threat Actors Love Gift Cards

guest · Sep 21, 2019

APWG: Phishing Continues to Rise, Threat Actors Love Gift Cards
September 19, 2019
https://info.phishlabs.com/blog/apwg-phishing-continues-rise-q2-2019

This week APWG released its findings from Q2 of this year that compiles insights from their member companies and provides an analysis of how phishing is changing. This quarter's report shows that phishing attacks continue to increase, both SaaS and email service providers are prime targets, BEC attacks are focused on getting gift cards, and more than half of phishing sites continue to abuse HTTPS.

The total number of phishing sites detected by APWG in 2Q was 182,465, up slightly from the 180,768 seen in 1Q 2019, and up notably from the 138,328 seen in 4Q 2018 and the 151,014 seen in 3Q 2018.
Between Q1 and Q2 of this year, there was a small increase in reported phishing attacks to APWG, but when compared to last year, there was nearly a 28% increase. APWG also tracks incoming reports from consumers but did not see significant increases.
BEC Attacks Love Gift Cards
No, threat actors don’t want to defraud companies of hundreds if not thousands of dollars just to listen to the latest Tool album. In many cases, threat actors seek out gift cards because they are significantly harder to track and there are numerous ways to exchange them for cash.
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APWG: Phishing Activity Trends Reports

Summary – 2nd Quarter 2019

The number of phishing attacks rose in the second quarter of 2019, eclipsing the number seen in the first quarter of 2019, and far above the amount recorded in the second half of 2018.

Employees should beware of requests for gift cards and payroll account changes. Gift cards were requested in 65% of business email compromise (BEC) attacks. About 20% of BEC attacks requested payroll diversions, and 15% requested direct bank transfers. The average bogus bank transfer request was for $64,717.

Phishing that targeted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and webmail services continued to be biggest category of phishing.

Certain top-level domains had more prevalent levels of phishing in them, while others avoided phishing.

Criminals in South America used holiday shopping to take advantage of consumers.

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APWG: "Phishing Activity Trends Report – 2nd Quarter 2019" (PDF - 2.15 MB): https://docs.apwg.org/reports/apwg_trends_report_q2_2019.pdf

guest · Apr 7, 2020

BEC gift card scams switch to online stores due to pandemic
April 7, 2020
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...cams-switch-to-online-stores-due-to-pandemic/

Scammers behind business email compromise (BEC) attacks have adjusted their tactics to match the current situation given the tens of millions of employees working from home during the COVID-19 outbreak.

While normally, they've been attempting to convince victims to buy gift cards as a quick favor to one of their company's executives, they've now switched to asking them for digital gift cards since brick and stone stores are now either closed or a lot harder to reach due to lockdowns.

"All a threat actor needs to do is ask unsuspecting victims to send them a picture of the physical gift cards, which can then be sold for roughly 70% of face value in bitcoin," Agari researchers who discovered this recent development explain.
Online stores are always open
The hook used by the scammers to trick their victims is still the same: while impersonating their company's CEO or another executive, they ask them to buy digital gift cards for any number of reasons such as an employee bonus or a vendor payment.
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"While we don’t yet have concrete evidence about how these stores come into play, it seems a safe assumption that victims asked to buy gift cards either comply, or are refusing to venture out and are instead looking for safer alternatives to make the purchase," Agari found.
"The safest way for the scammers to cash out is through digital gift cards, and they just started doing it."
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Agari: BEC Gift Card Scams Move Online During COVID-19 Pandemic

With 60 million corporate employees working remotely due to the Coronavirus outbreak, cybercriminals are switching up their tactics in business email compromise (BEC) scams
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guest · Sep 3, 2020

Gift Cards Requested in Two-Thirds of BEC Attacks, Report Reveals
September 1, 2020
https://www.tripwire.com/state-of-s...-in-two-thirds-of-bec-attacks-report-reveals/

A report revealed that scammers requested funds in the form of gift cards in two-thirds of business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

For a phishing trends report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), APWG member Agari examined thousands of BEC attacks that occurred in the second half of 2020. It found that 66% of them involved gift cards. By contrast, direct bank transfers factored in just 18% of attacks, followed close behind by payroll diversions at 16%.
The amount of money requested by scammers varied according to these means of attack.
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Agari discovered that the average BEC wire transfer attempt was $80,183–up from $54,000 the previous quarter. By contrast, scammers requested an average of $1,213 in attacks involving gift cards. That was down from about $1,453 in the first quarter of the year.

APWG feels that these smaller asks in the form of gift cards might have benefited scammers. As it explained in its report:

Scam attempts around this dollar amount may have a decent chance of success, because they can be approved by multiple people in a medium-to-large company, and the amount is small enough to slip by some companies’ financial controls. Gift cards for eBay, Google Play, Apple iTunes, and Steam Walletmade up 70percentof gift card requests in the second quarter.
Agari found that 72% of BEC attacks sent in Q2 2020 emanated from free webmail attacks. (That was up from 61% the previous quarter.) Half of those attacks came from Gmail accounts.
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APWG: Phishing Activity Trends Reports

Summary – 2nd Quarter 2020

The average wire transfer attempt in the second quarter of 2020 was $80,183, up notably from $54,000 in the first quarter. A Russian BEC operation has been targeting companies for an average of $1.27 million.

The number of phishing sites detected in the second quarter of 2020 was 146,994, down from the 165,772 observed in the first quarter.

Phishing that targeted webmail and Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) users continued to be biggest category of phishing. Attacks targeting the Social Media sector increased in Q2 about 20 percent over Q1, primarily driven by targeted attacks against Facebook and WhatsApp.

78 percent of all phishing sites now use SSL protection.

After an explosion in 2019 and into early 2020, phishing in Brazil dropped back slightly.

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APWG: "Phishing Activity Trends Report – 2nd Quarter 2020" (PDF - 8.52 MB): https://docs.apwg.org/reports/apwg_trends_report_q2_2020.pdf

guest · May 7, 2021

Microsoft: Business email compromise attack targeted dozens of orgs
May 7, 2021
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...il-compromise-attack-targeted-dozens-of-orgs/

Microsoft detected a large-scale business email compromise (BEC) campaign that targeted more than 120 organizations using typo-squatted domains registered a few days before the attacks started.

BEC scammers use various tactics (including social engineering, phishing, or hacking) to compromise business email accounts, later used to redirect payments to bank accounts under their control or target employees in gift card scams.

"We observed patterns in using the correct domain name but an incorrect TLD, or slightly spelling the company name wrong. These domains were registered just days before this email campaign began," the Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team said.
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Microsoft: Business email compromise campaign targets wide range of orgs with gift card scam

Cybercriminals continue to target businesses to trick recipients into approving payments, transferring funds, or, in this case, purchasing gift cards.
BEC gift card campaign seen targeting various organizations
In this campaign, attackers targeted a variety of companies in the consumer goods, process manufacturing and agriculture, real estate, discrete manufacturing, and professional services sectors.
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Upon closer examination, the actors had taken the extra step of faking the In-Reply-To and References headers, which added an extra air of legitimacy to the email.

This characteristic sets this campaign apart from most BEC campaigns, where attackers simply include a real or specially crafted fake email, adding the sender, recipient, and subject, in the new email body, making appear as though the new email was a reply to the previous email.
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