Don’t be fooled by this crafty new vishing attack, Microsoft customers warned

This is the third vishing attack the researchers have run across this year alone

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A new voicephishing(vishing) scam is tricking victims by spooking them with fakeMicrosoft Defenderinvoices in an attempt to take control of their computers.

Cybersecurityexperts atemailsecurity vendor Armorblox have shared details of the vishing campaign, which is the third of its kind encountered by the researchers this year.

Aimed at acloud collaborationcompany, the scam begins with an email containing a fake invoice for a subscription forMicrosoftDefender, inviting recipients to contact a toll-free number to sort any discrepancies.

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“We also observed a variant of this vishing email that made minor changes to the email title, body, invoice amount, and toll-free number, but was still essentially the same vishing email,”notesArmorBlox’s Abhishek Iyer.

Wishful thinking

Wishful thinking

The researchers note that the scammers don’t just do a wonderful job of crafting the fake invoice, but also manage to get their message pastGoogle Workspaceemail security.

The email is sent from aGmailaddress, doesn’t contain any URLs (malicious or otherwise), and nor does it have any attachments. The combination of these techniques helps the email bypass known detection controls.

If someone calls the listed phone number, the attackers attempt to convince their victim to install aremote desktoptool (AnyDeskin this instance) in order to initiate anRDP attack.

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“The end goal could have been installing malware/ransomwareon the victims’ system, stealing their login data, extracting sensitive/confidential company information, and so on. Once the attacker has control of a victim’s system, all bets are off,” concludes Iyer.

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’sTechRadar Pro’sexpert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.

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