http://www.csoonline.com/article/739117/aggressive-social-engineering-campaign-uncovered-in-europe
By Steve Ragan
Staff Writer
CSO Online
September 04, 2013
Earlier this year, Symantec discovered an aggressive social engineering
campaign targeting a limited set of multi-national firms in Europe. The attacks
were by the book, employing classic techniques, eventually netting the
criminals vast sums of stolen funds for their efforts.
In April, an administrative assistant working in a French-based multi-national
firm got an email that referenced an invoice hosted in a filesharing service
(such as Dropbox). A few moments later, a person posing as a senior executive
within the same firm -- speaking flawless French -- spoke with authority and
requested that she process the invoice referenced in the email.
"Over the last few months, we've seen hackers use more multi-staged social
engineering attacks to penetrate various organizations. [This recent] attack is
a prime example of how one such group used several principles of influence to
get the target to take an action they shouldn't have," said Chris Hadnagy of
Social-Engineer, Inc., in an email to CSO.
The administrative assistant processed the invoice without question, unaware
that the file was actually a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) configured to
communicate with a server in the Ukraine. Once installed, the attacker used the
RAT to take control over the assistant's workstation, logging keystrokes,
monitoring the desktop, and exfiltrating files for later examination.
[...]
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