Thread Hijacking: Phishes That Prey on Your Curiosity
Summary: In a thread hijacking attack reported by KrebsOnSecurity, LancasterOnline journalist Brett Sholtis received two emails in 2024 from Adam Kidan, the subject of a September 2023 story, one appearing to be a conversation with the subject line "Re: Successfully sent data" and another titled "Acknowledge New Work Order" with an attachment. Sholtis clicked the attachment, which opened a fake Microsoft Office 365 login page that checked submitted credentials against the real Microsoft site and recorded valid ones, but he did not enter his Outlook credentials and forwarded the messages to IT, which flagged them as phishing.
Bottom line: Proofpoint says it has tracked more than 90 million malicious messages in the last five years using this method, and thread hijacking works because it omits the urgency tell most phishing relies on, preying instead on the recipient's curiosity about a private conversation they appear to have been copied on.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
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