Curious Orca BEC Scammers Use Email Probes to Validate Targets

silversurfer

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Aug 17, 2014
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A newly discovered scammer group from Nigeria dubbed Curious Orca has been observed while conducting manual target validation using blank emails to verify target information before launching their business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

BEC (which is also known as Email Account Compromise - EAC) fraud schemes are scams through which fraudsters trick one or more employees of a targeted organization into wiring money after posing as entities they trust like the company's CEO or trusted business partners, with the legitimate bank accounts were the funds would end being swapped beforehand with ones controlled by the crooks.

As part of the attack chain, the crooks have to first generate a list of employees they can target and validate the collected information to make sure that they all the data on the entity they decide to impersonate as part of the scam.

BEC attack chain

BEC attack chain
 

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