Alert – Email Scams Targeting Businesses and Individuals

Recently, there has been widespread news coverage in Australia about a concerning email scam that’s targeting businesses and individuals. Based on recent activity on our business systems, we want to make you aware of this threat, as it’s more relevant now than ever.

What’s Happening on Our Systems

In the past two weeks, we’ve observed a massive increase in attempts to access our email servers by unauthorised individuals, or “hackers.” These attackers are using a method known as a “brute-force attack.”

What is a Brute-Force Attack?

In a brute-force attack, the hacker repeatedly tries different combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols to guess passwords and gain access. It’s like trying every possible key on a keyring until one finally unlocks the door. This can be time-consuming, but hackers use automated software to make thousands of guesses per second.

A New Tactic – Using Multiple IP Addresses

What makes this recent wave of attacks unusual is that it’s coming from a much larger pool of IP addresses. On our systems we log tens of thousands of these attempts per day.

What is an IP Address?

An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique string of numbers that identifies each device connected to the internet, a bit like a digital address. In this case, hackers are using many different IP addresses in quick succession to disguise the attack.

This technique allows them to bypass standard security measures designed to recognise and block multiple attempts from the same address. Normally, security tools like “fail2ban” software detect repeated login attempts from the same IP and block access. But by cycling through a list of random IPs addresses with each attempt, the attackers are making it impossible for such tools to catch them.

I have had to write custom software to identify these attacks as no current malware or anti-virus software applications are able to help.

How They’re Trying to Trick You

In addition to actually using your current email account to send emails using the method described above, the attackers are also using “social engineering” tactics to make their emails look more convincing.

What is Social Engineering?

Social engineering is when an attacker tricks you into believing something false by making their approach seem familiar or trustworthy. In this case, they’re forging the “From” address in emails to make it look like it’s coming from within our own system. The email might appear to be from your own address, as if you had emailed yourself.

By doing this, they’re trying to make you believe they’ve already accessed your account, hoping this will lead you to panic and possibly respond to their instructions or provide sensitive information.

Knowing What To Expect Is The First Step to Protect Yourself

These fake emails are being sent to all employees daily, so it is likely that most people will encounter this type of attack very soon, if they haven’t already.

The Extortion Email

1. The writer claims to be a “hacker”.
2. They claim to have bypassed any virus scanners on your PC
3. They claim to have accessed (controlled) your camera
4. They claim to have accessed your microphone
5. They claim to have a full recording of an event (masturbation to porn) secretly recorded using the access they had to your camera, etc.
6. They claim to have originated from your mail server by using my password which they found on a publicly available, stolen database, from a recent data breach.
7. They claim to have access to your full email address list in addition to all the files on my computer.
8. The emails are all “hand written”, in that they have slightly different versions of the claims each time and the English is not always the same.
9. The newer versions of these emails, have significantly better English and could possibly have been drafted by ChatGPT.
10. They then proceed to outline their extortion:- Don’t tell the police. Don’t tell anybody. Pay a sum of $1,500 in cryptocurrency to their account. If you do not comply with their demand, they threaten to put the video on social media and send it directly to all the people in your email address book.

Needless to say, this was received on a company email system where the employee PCs are all running Linux, so in our case, you can imagine, the claims are not true, however, this particular email highlights the biggest threats that we have faced in the realm of personal computing.

These emails make a lot claims which could be true for some individuals, however, the ability to access devices and files on your personal computer by the “hacker” should be considered very real for a lot more people.

These emails have come with with an almost perfect forgery of the headers produced by our company email server, so they appear to be coming from within our system. I suspect that most people would not be able to work out that they are in fact, forged.

Criminals Lead The Way – Everybody Else Plays Catch-up

As long as I have worked in Information Technology (IT), I have seen the security world play catch-up, to the criminal world, while large corporations (e.g. Microsoft) play catch-up to the security world and finally governments eventually catch-up to everybody else, if ever.

So in light of this, the following events are occurring, or will shortly occur, if the misuse of technology continues along the path it is going now:

1. cameras, microphones and keyboards are accessible on your PC by Microsoft via their new Windows platforms.
2. cameras, microphones and keyboards could be accessible by Facebook and Google legally once they implement their hands-off AI systems for profiling users.
3. government intelligence agencies have full access of the activities you do, via the camera, microphone and keyboard using “standard connections” built into MS Windows on modern PCs.
4. since you have not absolute proof of your identity, Digital IDs and Digital Currencies will be freely transferable to either government officials, or to cybercriminals, without your knowledge or consent, by anybody who is able to access your equipment.

Improved Identity Theft

The ability for a cybercriminal to pretend to be you, will become insanely easy. Not only are they able to get pictures of you, but also video footage. Your voice recording and any identifiable features about you and your life, will be able to be compiled into a “perfect” forgery for obtaining new phone accounts, bank loans, purchasing, government services, and so much more.

AI Makes Bio-metric Forgery Perfect

To help the criminals make the forgery perfect, we now have many Artificial Intelligent (AI) systems available, that are able to doctor photos, videos, audio to make them virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

Defend Yourself Now

If you have not started thinking about this yet, you may already be too late. In any case here are my recommendations:

• Remove MS Windows as soon as possible and replace it with Linux.
• Disable the cameras and microphone in your PC, if you do not need them for your daily computing. This goes for all operating systems, as the browsers are also being used for this.
• Push back on the spread of mass surveillance in your country.
• Stop your government from trying to introduce Digital Currencies and Digital IDs.
  
  In Australia this is so far along that the only way to push back is simply to leave your smartphone and home, don’t sign up for any government service online and visit government offices in person to get service. Then pay cash for everything.