Cyber criminals hijacking legitimate website comms

Kaspersky researchers have found that criminals are increasingly exploiting registration, subscription and feedback forms on websites to insert spam content or phishing links into confirmation emails from respected and trustworthy companies on a global scale.

This is one of the latest methods to emerge for criminals to deliver their spam and phishing messages to recipients, while bypassing existing content filters.

These methods typically hijack communications from a legitimate source with a good reputation so that users cannot ignore the message.

This creates a challenge for companies because this malicious content, seemingly sent on their behalf, could compromise their customers’ trust or even lead to personal data leaks.

The researchers found that a method gaining popularity exploits the fact that almost every company is interested in receiving feedback from their clients to improve the quality of service, customer retention, and reputation.

To do this, companies ask customers to register a personal account, subscribe to newsletters or communicate with feedback forms on the website to ask questions or leave suggestions.

These are the mechanisms that attackers are exploiting, the researchers warn, noting that all three mechanisms require the customers’ name and email address.