The latest Gmail attacks involved the hackers directly.
Now Gmail account holders are the targets of hackers using an almost flawless so-called AI call scam. There are 2.5 billion users of Gmail according to Google statistics and these form the target of these hackers who advanced their phishing methods.
This is a story of Sam Mitrovic on the experience he went through in this scam.
Microsoft Solutions Consultant Sam Mitrovic wrote a blog post mentioning the scam recently. It all started with a notification concerning an effort to restore a Gmail account, which is commonly used to manipulate the user into logging into a fake login page in order to steal their credentials. Unfortunately Sam Mitrovic was by minimizing time which is aware of the trap and refused the request. But, after about forty minutes, he received a notification that he had a missed call, which he assumed was from Google Sydney.
A week later came another request to recover an account that had previously been closed. True to their tradition, other calls were incoming about 40 minutes after I declined the previous call. This time Sam Mitrovic answered and a man with American accent who said he was a Google Support member was on the other end. The man agreed with the list of malicious activity spotted on Sam Mitrovic’s Gmail account and stated that a malicious actor had full control of the account for a week and exported the data.
How to thwart such a scam
While being on the call, Sam Mitrovic decided to return to the phone number that has dialed the call. The five digits number was quickly searched in Google and found to be genuine according to Google business listing. However, understanding that con artists may bypass the actual number identifying a caller, he did not believe and demanded to receive an e-mail from the so-called representative of a certain company. When it was in his inbox, all of it looked rather legitimate, save for one of the entries in the ‘to’ field as it proved to be a rather cunning masked non–Google related address.
The biggest clue came next. That was when the caller said “Hello”, he waited for about 10 seconds before replying and then say ‘Hello’ again that made Sam Mitrovic know that what he was experiencing was an AI voice and the spacing and manner of pronounced words could not be emulated by a human. This is where Sam Mitrovic got the. idea that it was a scam that is why they had to hang up.
To fight online scams the leading company Google has entered into partnership agreement with GASA and DNS RF.
Two days ago, Google disclosed that it had joined forces with GASA and DNS Research Federation to fight scams. The initiative commonly known as the Global Signal Exchange is meant to operate like a crime fighting center that an produces real-time analysis of scams fraud and other forms of cybercrime.
How to protect yourself from phishing scams
These new, more convincing practices necessitate continued careful and to perform minimal protocols’ check on them. That way you are on safer ground if you have some doubts as to whether the message received from the company is genuine.
