Targeted Smishing Attacks by Threat Group “The Com” On The Rise

Cyber activity by the group "The Com," which leverages (SIM) swapping, cryptocurrency theft, swatting, and corporate intrusions, is increasing.

Security researchers at Intel471 have published an analysis of the threat group, “The Com” (short for “The Community”), providing details about their targets and tactics.

Operating mostly from Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., “The Com” uses three relatively consistent tactics:

1. The send phishing messages via SMS, using social engineering to get potential victims to engage with the link provided
2. They impersonate the single sign-on platform Okta, pulling web resources directly from Okta’s website to make the logon appear legitimate
3. They impersonate company IT staff and call victims to circumnavigate MFA

The texts used are rather compelling as well, using phrasing like the following to get the attention of the victim and to establish it’s related to their company (to make the Okta logon’s feel more legitimate):

Source: Intel471

The Com’s endgame is to exfiltrate data from victim organizations using the compromised credentials. Based on analysis of phishing pages used by the group, it appears they are primarily targeting telecom and tech industries, but are definitely reaching across industry sectors:

Source: Intel471

Intel471 provide some hardening and detection recommendations to make it more difficult for such attacks to succeed and to monitor user activity for those that do.

Their prevention recommendation revolve around the need for security awareness training to “train users to identify phishing pages and confirm they are accessing a legitimate website operated by the organization.”

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