Cybercriminals are coming up with creative ways to scam people out of money. Researchers found that they were using Google Forms’ quiz feature to generate spam messages.
Google Forms, which is part of the company’s free workspace suite, is being tracked for abuse. A few yearsHowever, according to cybersecurity firm Cisco Talos, the recent trend is to use specific features within quizzes. analyzed operation.
In particular, how spammers can abuse the ability to create a new quiz in Google Forms, answer it using the victim’s email address, and publish their quiz scores to send malicious emails. I discovered. It doesn’t matter if you can answer the quiz questions or not.
Spam messages can be customized to include any text or URL. Because the email technically originates from Google itself, it is likely to bypass anti-spam protections and reach victims’ inboxes, researchers said.
Cisco Talos announced last month that a Google Forms quiz was used in an elaborate cryptocurrency scam.
In this campaign, hackers used quiz score emails to lure recipients to an external website, claiming they could claim more than 1.3 Bitcoin (approximately $46,000) as a result of “automated cloud Bitcoin mining.”
Researchers say the web domain, which was registered in late October, has seen a significant increase in the number of queries.
The website and its sign-in form appear legitimate and are pre-filled with the potential victim’s username and password. Additionally, the website allegedly has a group chat feature where users discuss crypto-related topics. However, researchers observed that the users commenting in this chat were fake and repeated the same comments over and over again.
If you try to claim your Bitcoins from this website, you will be redirected to what appears to be a live chat with an agent named Sophia. She collects the victim’s personal data and instructs them to pay a $64 “exchange fee” in Bitcoin to claim the final amount. Collecting this small fee appears to be the main goal of the campaign, researchers say.
According to Cisco Talos, so far no one seems to have fallen for the scam and actually paid money to the attackers, as the connected Bitcoin wallet was empty as of early November.
But the amount of configuration work required to carry out such spam attacks, and the extraordinary attention to detail that goes into social engineering, means that even small amounts of money can be extorted from victims. , shows just how far cybercriminals will go. researchers said.
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Darina Antonyuk
Daryna Antoniuk is a freelance reporter for Recorded Future News based in Ukraine. She writes about cybersecurity startups, cyber attacks in Eastern Europe, and the state of the cyber war between Ukraine and Russia. She previously served as a technology reporter for Forbes Her Ukraine. Her work has also appeared in Sifted, The Kyiv Independent and The Kyiv Post.