A recent phishing campaign involving the use of SMS messages to lure potential victims into disclosing their bank-account access credentials is the latest evidence of growing attacker interest in users of mobile apps.
Lookout, which tracked the threat, Friday described it as impacting mobile users in dozens of countries, including the US. Among those targeted were customers of Chase, HSBC, TD, Scotiabank, and CIBC banks. The campaign appears to have started in June 2019 but is currently offline.
The mobile security vendor said it detected at least 4,000 unique IP addresses belonging to mobile users who appear to have fallen for the scam. Lookout said it is not sure how the victims were impacted financially because of a lack of visibility into how the attackers might have actually used the compromised credentials.
But campaigns like these are a clear warning for mobile users, says Apurva Kumar, staff security intelligence engineer at Lookout. "Mobile phishing is on the rise," Kumar says. "The attack was entirely mobile-focused, from delivering messages via SMS to rendering the phishing sites as mobile banking logins."
For bad actors, mobile phishing is an attractive attack vector because it is often easier to obfuscate details of a scam on the mobile form factor, she says. With the increased use of multifactor authentication for signing into many apps, consumers have grown accustomed to banks communicating with them via SMS and therefore are less likely to scrutinize the messages as carefully as they should.
Mobile devices are also attractive targets because of the amount of sensitive data they hold, Kumar says. "Many end users are still unaware that mobile phishing exists or ..
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