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Cybersecurity for middle market operations
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A new wave of financial fraud is being targeted by scammers who use social media to gain control of the victim’s bank account, according to research by Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs.
Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs found that 32 percent of money-related fraud victims were targeted by attackers who impersonated them on social media or marketed fake investment opportunities. With the rapid growth of social media, Cyble’s research team created an automated bot named "Ned" that monitors tweets and financial scams.
This method is much easier for scammers as they can create many fake accounts to gather information about what type of investments their victims might be interested in, then contact them via social media channels to gain control of their accounts.
"It's a pretty simple scam. Anybody can have multiple bank accounts and the fraudsters need to contact only 1 customer who is interested in an investment opportunity they can sell to them," said Cyble CEO Yoni Assia.
"We saw that social media channels, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, are being used with increasing frequency by attackers for the purpose of getting initial information about a potential victim, targeting them with messages and then convincing them to hand over their credentials," Assia added.
