Less than 24 hours after the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, cybercriminals launched spam campaigns aimed at exploiting the momentum of solidarity among populations in several countries.
While tens of thousands of people have been killed or gone missing and thousands of rescuers are tirelessly probing buildings collapsed in search of survivors buried under the rubble, web fraudsters take advantage of this to rob the generosity of people around the world who wish to make a financial contribution to the victims of the disaster.
Cybercriminals employ a method well known to computer security experts. That of phishing carried out with great blow fake emails to divert donations that have been made in crypto-currencies by Internet users. ” Many families and children are displaced, leaving them homeless. The Wladimir Foundation has taken the initiative to provide first aid on the ground to help as many people in distress as possible. We urge you to donate to the victims “says, for example, one of these misleading messages.
South Korea, main target of fraudulent messages
But the Wladimir Charity Foundation, which was originally set up in October 2022 to help victims in war-torn Ukraine, has since been squatted by online scammers. The name of this fake charity is already blacklisted in the anti-spam and anti-fraud databases of IT security specialists from Bitdefender company who conducted the investigation. And according to the conclusions of these experts, most of the malicious emails come from internet addresses located in Pakistan.
The first batch of fraudulent messages that were analyzed revealed the hackers’ favorite targets. Cybercriminals mainly target Internet users from South Korea, then to a lesser extent these scams have already contaminated email addresses in Vietnam, the United States and India, but also in Denmark, Ireland, Germany and the United Kingdom. United.
This new spam campaign, following the earthquake, is certainly not an isolated act. With cybercriminals abusing the empathy of Internet users who react spontaneously to the plight of disaster-affected populations, it is to be feared that these online scams are on the increase. Bitdefender experts therefore urge us to be cautious in the coming days by favoring official platforms or channels for any charitable action and to carry out online research on dubious charities that would solicit your donations only in the form of crypto- currencies.
► To read also: Turkey, a long history of devastating earthquakes