Indiscriminate email hacking campaigns are so 2018.
Some attackers have shifted away from sending a high volume of malicious emails in favor of more customized attacks aimed at high value targets.
Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which tries to stop state-sponsored hacking, sent nearly 40,000 warnings in 2019 to users alerting them that they were the target of a government-backed phishing attempt. That figure is down by nearly 25% from 2018, the company said in a blog post Thursday. One-in-five of the accounts targeted in 2019 was targeted multiple times.
“If at first the attacker does not succeed, they’ll try again using a different lure, different account, or trying to compromise an associate of the target,” Toni Gidwani, a security engineering manager at the company’s Threat Analysis Group, said in the blog post.
Yet that drop preceded an uptick in 2020 in attempted attacks. The hackers behind the most recent wave of attacks were often from Iran or North Korea, masquerading as reporters to build trust with a target, then try to break into their accounts or fabricate an idea for an article.
“For example, attackers impersonate a journalist to seed false stories with other reporters to spread disinformation,” Gidwani wrote.
“In other cases, attackers will send several benign emails to build a rapport with a journalist or foreign policy expert before sending a malicious attachment in a follow up email. Government-backed attackers regularly target foreign policy experts for their research, access to the organizations they work with, and connection to fellow researchers or policymakers for subsequent attac ..
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