This huge typosquatting campaign is being used to run tech support scams

Date:
Thu, 27 Oct 2022 17:17:30 +0000

Description:
Scammers are getting people's phone numbers, and possibly even access to
their bank accounts.

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A large typosquatting campaign has been detected abusing Amazons AWS cloud platform to lure people into tech support scams.

After being tipped off by an actual computer technician working at a local shop, researchers at Malwarebytes discovered a big typosquatting campaign
that started roughly a month ago.

The campaign is quite dangerous, too, as victims are not only charged for the tech support service they receive, but the scammers often end up accessing
the victims bank accounts and later drain them out. Faking a security issue

Typosquatting is a popular technique among cybercriminals, and relies on people making a typo in ignorance or by accident. If a person were to mistype a website theyre looking to visit - they would usually see a message saying the website doesnt exist. However, some criminals obtain these mistyped domains and use them to plant malicious landing pages hosted on AWS.

In this instance, unknown threat actors obtained a Wells Fargo lookalike domain - wellsfargo[.]cm (instead of .com). People visiting this website will get a popup saying their endpoint has numerous viruses and threats, that its locked for security reasons, and that they should call customer support via a phone number on the landing page. Read more

This typosquatting campaign is using over 200 domains to compromise Windows

and Android users

Tackling malicious domains and typosquatting

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Besides the risk of talking to the fraudsters on the phone, giving them
access to the devices and possibly even bank accounts - there is also the
risk of the fraudsters knowing peoples phone numbers, which can later be used in identity theft scams.

The best way to protect against such attacks is to make sure youre typing the addresses correctly and to be suspicious of any security pop-ups saying the device is locked and urging the user to act immediately.

While Malwarebytes claims this is a major typosquatting campaign, it listed
10 domains that were recently hijacked, including Amazon, DuckDuckGo,
Walmart, and Home Depot. We dont know how many people might have been
affected by this attack. These are the best firewalls out there



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/this-huge-typosquatting-campaign-is-being-used- to-run-tech-support-scams/


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