Hackers use Malicious QR Codes to Retrieve Employee Credentials. Sophisticated technology has been overwritten by simple technologies like QR replacing Barcodes. QR (Quick Response) has been playing a major role in the current generation, which provides the response within a snap.
Speaking of the speed QR codes provide, hackers adapting themselves to it for conducting phishing attacks has increased. Researchers at Inky have seen the latest phishing campaign with QR codes for stealing credentials from employees.
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"Hackers use Malicious QR Codes to Steal Employee Credentials 1")
QR Phishing Campaign
The recent QR phishing campaign comes from hijacked organizational accounts which impersonate large brands like Microsoft, Sharepoint, or others.
Based on their analysis, the phishing campaigns originated from a hijacked Japanese retail store, an American manufacturer, and a digital marketing service company in Canada.
Altogether, these phishing campaigns account for more than 545 emails originating from hijacked accounts, which are found to be a “spray and pray” attack by the attackers.
Image-based QR Phishing
One of the most unique techniques followed in this phishing campaign is that these emails do not contain any text in them. Instead, the email contains only an image of the Malicious QR Codes and the text, which evades any text-based phishing detection.
These emails additionally require an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert the words in the image to text which is then used for checking phishing texts.
To make this phishing campaign more legitimate to the victims, they have added a parameter in the URL with the victim’s email ID that automatically fills in the email address and name of the victim. This convinces any person who doesn’t have an awareness of phishing.
Inky has published a complete analysis of the phishing campaign. Individuals must train to protect themselves from these kinds of malicious phishing attempts.
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