Weekly summary 4/14-4/20

Finishing an atypical calm Smishing and Vishing week 4/14-4/20. Besides a few standard FI Smishing campaigns targeting Bank of America and Wells Fargo - NUMBERCOP tracked only a handful of additional targeted campaigns namely for Firth Third Bank and Omaha Mutual (NE). On the Vishing side M&T Bank area codes were hit again (consistently using caller ID 8774637786) and Barclays nation-wide (via 8664674713).

Internationally, Bank of Montreal (Canada) and Natwest (UK) were continued targets. We collected further details that Natwest’s Smishing campaign uses a Spoofed Sender ID, (instead of a hijacked Sender ID as believed earlier) for sending out Smishing text messages. With Natwest now being targeted non-stop for 2nd months it becomes evident how hard it is for an affected brand to shut down and non-compliant SMS VAS in the UK.

Within the wider Smishing news we recommend to follow a few sessions at this years RSA Security Conference taking place in San Francisco this week. In particular Cathal Mc Daid’s session on Smishing (details here, presentation attached) which should be largely in line with NUMBERCOP’s Spam Research.

As always please find our weekly Smishing sampling below and on our API for further details.