Festive Phishing Campaigns

Carbon Black's TAU found most attempted seasonal cyberattacks are the result of commodity malware delivered via spear-phishing campaigns. Attacks in recent years have targeted major brands, often via supply chain partners, resulting in losses of millions of customer records and credit card numbers – not to mention the financial cost of a breach for the affected businesses.

Inboxes are more crowded than usual during this time of year with the rise in online shopping, greetings, and travel plans. Attackers are using the influx of messages to trick people with fraudulent emails poisoned with bad links or attachments. Most of these arrive with subject lines that reference online shopping, event invitations, and order shipments, Cofense explains.

A common tactic is sending emails that link to an e-gift card, says Cofense co-founder and CTO Aaron Higbee. When clicked, it'll download a Word doc weaponized with an Office macro. When executed, that will drop and execute a sample of the Geodo/Emotet banking Trojan.

"There are no new streams of malware we've identified in the past couple of months – just enhancements to existing delivery mechanisms," he says. Some phishing emails are crafted to look like package deliveries and tracking notices.

"We're all in a kind of mindset of, 'Look out for things I could have potentially ordered,'" Higbee adds. If a fraudulent tracking notice slips into our inbox, we're unlikely to know it's fake, and fake tracking notices often aim to deliver malware.