Russia: a phishing attack plays on the fear of mobilization

InfoSecurity revealed a phishing campaign targeting Russian Telegram users on January 12, 2023. It used their fear of being mobilized to extract personal information from them.

There are insistent rumors that Russian President Vladimir Putin is considering a new campaign to recruit 500,000 men for the Ukrainian front. For several weeks, this topic has been agitating Russian social networks.

Cybercriminals have taken advantage of this climate of concern to launch their campaign on Telegram. They circulated a message referring to a document that was supposed to contain the list of future recruits.

The fraudulent document asked users to fill in personal information, including their Telegram IDs and passwords. This was done officially to « find their name more easily » in the list, but in reality to steal this information.

The cybercriminals also asked users to forward the link to this document to ten contacts in order to use it for free. This simple distribution technique was very successful. The identity of the attackers remains unknown for the time being, but pro-Ukrainian hackers are being considered.