North Americans shopping online are being subjected to a new sophisticated phishing kit with detection aversion techniques that leverages holiday-focused lures since September, BleepingComputer reports.
Attackers using the new phishing kit have been sending emails looking to lure potential victims with a prize-winning opportunity, with the messages including links using URL shorteners that redirect to phishing pages, an Akami report revealed.
Popular cloud services, such as Google, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services, have been exploited by attackers to evade detection, while several brands, including Costco and Delta Airlines, have been impersonated in an effort to establish legitimacy.
Fake user testimonials on received prizes have also been created by the attackers to more effectively lure victims, according to the report, which also showed that U.S. and Canadian users accounted for nearly 89% of individuals landing on the phishing domains.
The findings also showed the phishing kit's usage of a token-based system that enables victim redirection to unique URLs.
Included in the exposed dataset labeled "PDL" were individuals' full names, email addresses, phone numbers, location data, professional summaries, and skills, as well as education and employment histories.
Attackers could leverage the issue — which impacts Nexus 3000, 7000, and 9000 series switches with vulnerable NX-OS versions with DHCPv6 activated and are in standalone NX-OS mode — to facilitate continuous crashes of the dhcp_snoop process and a denial-of-service condition.
Higher rewards of up to $250,000 will be given by Google for the discovery of memory corruption flaws in the Chrome browser shown to achieve remote code execution using a non-sandboxed process as part of a more robust vulnerability reward program.