Attackers Add a New Spin to Old Scams

[Mohammad.Poorya]

Scammers are figuring out unique ways of abusing cloud services to make their attacks look more genuine, Netskope says.

Cybercriminals have begun abusing legitimate cloud services in new ways to try and sneak attacks past security controls and make their scams appear more convincing to intended victims.

Netskope on Monday said its researchers had observed a recent trend among attackers to send phishing emails and SMS messages with links to malicious sites and content hosted on cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Google Docs.

The security vendor says it has seen the technique being used to try and direct users to scam pharmacy sites, dating sites, and tech support sites, designed to steal personal information or for blackmailing victims. In other instances, attackers are abusing Google Docs to create and share presentations that contain malicious links.

The scams themselves are old and well-known. What's new is the use of cloud services to host them.

Source