Hackers Target Social Media Influencers with Phishing Emails

Researchers working with Abnormal Security uncovered a recent narrowly targeted phishing campaign. The hackers running the campaign were targeting social media influencers and more specifically TikTok users with a lot of followers.

The gist of the campaign was an attempted scam, where the threat actors would send out phishing emails. The emails were constructed to look like they originated from TikTok itself and were asking the victims to verify their login credentials.

The attack was not targeted geographically but instead attempted to phish out influential TikTok accounts of users across the globe. The researchers tracked peaks of malicious activity originating from this particular campaign in the first days of October and November 2021. The accounts targeted were not just personalities but also commercial entities such as social media production studios and management companies.

The tactics used by the hackers are the usual - scaring users into actions that will compromise their security and luring them with false rewards. One of the emails used in the phishing campaigns attempted to persuade the account holders that their account somehow violated TikTok's copyright guidelines and they needed to reply to the fake warning, providing their login details along the way.

Another type of email advertised a made-up "verified badge" that the account holder was eligible for. Obtaining the false badge, according to the phishing bait, was only possible after replying to the email so the account could be "properly" verified.

Researchers tapped into the ongoing phishing campaign, pretending to be victims, and replied to the emails, only to receive a shortened URL link to a fake page that would scrape the real account holder's credentials and funnel them to the hackers.

Sadly, the campaign was relatively successful and there were a number of accounts that were either successfully taken over by the threat actors or deleted.

Targeting successful social media personalities is nothing new. It is no secret that some of those accounts belong to people and entities that make a lot of money and their accounts are valuable.