Nigerian email scammers upped their game, averaging 90,000 attacks monthly in 2019

guest · Mar 31, 2020

Nigerian email scammers upped their game, averaging 90,000 attacks monthly in 2019
March 31, 2020
https://www.cyberscoop.com/silverterrier-email-scam-nigeria/

A group of Nigerian scammers blamed for email fraud accelerated their attacks last year by attempting an average of more than 90,000 attacks per month.

The hacking crew, dubbed SilverTerrier by security researchers, began around 2014 as a small group that experimented with easy-to-detect hacking tools. By 2019, though, it had evolved into a team of “mature cybercriminals” who have produced 81,300 malicious software samples connected to 2.1 million attacks, according to Palo Alto Networks findings published Tuesday.

The SilverTerrier group is partly responsible for a 1,163% uptick in attacks against the professional and legal services industry last year, according to the Palo Alto Networks research.
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The SilverTerrier hackers, like other groups, typically rely on remote-access trojan tools, which allow the attackers to siphon data from a victim.

“Leveraging these tools, Nigerian actors can modify systems, access network resources and perform common functions on behalf of compromised users,” the report notes. “Over the past five years, we have tracked SilverTerrier’s use of 13 different RAT families.”
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Palo Alto Networks - Unit42: SilverTerrier: 2019 Nigerian Business Email Compromise Update

guest · May 7, 2020

SilverTerrier BEC scammers target US govt healthcare agencies
May 7, 2020
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...-scammers-target-us-govt-healthcare-agencies/

Government healthcare agencies, COVID-19 response organizations, and medical research facilities from across the globe were the targets of Business Email Compromise (BEC) phishing campaigns coordinated by multiple Nigerian BEC actors during the last three months.

Unit 42 attributed 2.1 million BEC attacks to the SilverTerrier actors since they began tracking their activities, with an average of 92,739 BEC attacks per month during 2019 and peaking at 245,637 BEC attacks in June.
COVID-19 response orgs under siege
As they say in a report shared with BleepingComputer, these recent SilverTerrier attacks have targeted a large array of organizations from government healthcare agencies, local and regional governments to large universities with medical programs/centers, regional utility entities, medical publishing and research firms, and insurance companies.

"While broad in their targeting, these actors have exercised minimal restraint in terms of targeting organizations that are critical to COVID-19 response efforts," the researchers explain.
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Victims' devices also infected with info stealers, spyware
The phishing emails sent by the actors behind these BEC campaigns also dropped hundreds of samples of Agent Tesla and NanoCore remote access trojans, the LokiBot and Formbook info stealers, as well as PowerShell scripts that would later download malicious payloads on the victims' devices.

"As 2020 progresses, the most prominent threat facing customers is commodity malware deployed in support of sophisticated BEC schemes," Unit 42's report adds.
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Palo Alto Networks - Unit42: SilverTerrier: New COVID-19 Themed Business Email Compromise Schemes

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Nigerian email scammers upped their game, averaging 90,000 attacks monthly in 2019

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