Phishing Attacks Use Social Media Notifications to Steal Credentials

Attackers are looking to steal the credentials of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter users with elaborate phishing campaigns. The target of these campaign employees of major enterprise organizations.

It might seem odd that attackers would go after social media accounts, but they have good reasons for this strategy. One of the reasons is that many people tend to use the same passwords for their personal and work accounts, which means that bad actors will often get a password that works on multiple domains.

These campaigns look just like any other phishing attempt. The goal is to trick people into entering their credentials into websites that look very much like the original they”re impersonating. It”s a well-known method that relies on the employees” lack of training to recognize phishing campaigns.

“These attacks impersonate popular social media platforms to deliver phishing emails to influential users of each platform by impersonating Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, in an attempt to extract login credentials,” say the researchers from Abnormal Security.

“In each case, these social media platforms are impersonated and contain urgent language, pressing the user to take action or their accounts will be deleted. The action to be taken is embedded in a link provided to appeal the decision to delete the account by the platform.”

The landing websites look very much like their real counterparts, and the Twitter domain imitates the actual one by replacing the “i” with a lower case “l”.

With so many people working from home, the activity on social media increased accordingly. If the employees lack the proper training to recognize a phishing campaign, they might be tempted to go through the steps and give their credentials to a third-party. It”s important to know that social media websites or any other services will not issue such emails, threatening suspension or termination of services. Always be careful when receiving email seemingly coming from official sources, and never open attachments coming from unknown sources.