From January 2022 to January 2023, more than 2,400 fraudulent pages targeting Arabic-speaking job seekers were discovered in 13 countries.
The findings were published by Group IB security researchers in an advisory released today. Among them, risk protection analysts Sharef Hlal and Olga Ulchenko said that companies based in Egypt (48%), Saudi Arabia (23%) and Algeria (17%) were most likely to be impersonated by fraudsters. says.
“This fraud scheme targets over 40 well-known brands in 13 countries in the MEA region,” the technical article explains, noting that 64% of the fraudulent pages discovered in the campaign impersonated companies in the logistics sector, followed by The food and beverage sector (20%) and the petroleum industry (12%).
The malicious campaign relies on an initial phishing attack attempt to direct the victim to a fraudulent web page containing similar descriptions of fake vacancies.
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“These fraudulent web pages contain[適用]Upon clicking the button, the victim is redirected to a phishing website created by scammers to harvest the victim’s social network account credentials. “
The scammers then access the victim’s account and update the associated password, email address and phone number information before demanding money from the victim to retrieve them.
According to security experts, the activity of this fraudulent campaign peaked in August 2022, creating over 600 new fake job pages.
Hlal and Ulchenko warn that the majority of fake social media pages are still online, with new ones being created daily.
“It is very important to combat this type of fraud. Businesses whose brands have been misappropriated by fraudsters can lose their reputation, and in the future, victims will be able to share their experience at the hands of fraudsters with their targeted brands. Because it can be related.”
The malicious campaign uncovered by Group-IB comes amid a rise in phishing attacks targeting mobile devices.