The WMC Global Threat Intelligence Team observed a noticeable escalation in targeted and sophisticated phishing campaigns throughout 2022, with a surge in SMS phishing and a decrease in campaigns featuring large corporations. Threat actors began to shift their focus to developing smish-to-vish campaigns — campaigns where threat actors use phone numbers in SMS messages as opposed to link-based phishing. In 2022, we also finally saw a move away from Covid-19 phishing lures as pandemic-related government funds and support stopped. Several new threat actors made an appearance in 2022 with prolific and novel campaigns explored below targeting banks and big name brands.

The latest US trend has seen threat actors moving from generic, wide-reaching phishing attacks using major banks as lures to targeted attacks featuring small credit unions. Although customers of financial institutions are the most common mark, there was a jump in threat actors specifically targeting credit union customers throughout the US, whereas in the UK a prevalent phishing campaign took advantage of the government-backed energy rebate scheme as energy prices peaked at an all-time high. As expected, big brands like Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, and PayPal were still targeted regularly throughout the year. 

Threat actors have found continuous success using package delivery services as SMS phishing lures since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and package delivery phishing attacks are the number one harvester of credit cards that WMC Global is currently seeing. Scammers now gravitate towards any new courier as a lure because of the sheer effectiveness of the campaigns. These lures are often used to perform call back scams but consumers get wise to the same attack content, resulting in threat actors needing to diversify and increase their portfolio of campaigns. Introducing Evri, the latest UK courier company to be heavily targeted and brand abused for credential phishing attacks. 

Threat Summary

New phishing campaigns are targeting mobile devices to deliver fraudulent courier delivery notifications to potential victims. While many organizations secure email and Microsoft Office applications directly within mobile phones, SMS threats are typically out of scope for many security teams, letting attackers exploit the lapse in coverage to leverage both consumer and business credentials. WMC Global's Threat Intelligence Team is currently tracking an increase in SMS-based courier scams in the United Kingdom. By the end of March over 5000 phishing URLs had been collected targeting Hermes alone. Targeted couriers are Hermes, DPD, and Royal Mail, with Hermes seeing a notable increase in distribution.

Phishers are well known for identifying and exploiting security weaknesses. Many email and security teams are becoming more effective at blocking attacks, but phishers are targeting new gaps in remote workforce and SMS phishing detection. Specifically, threat actors are increasing the delivery of phishing campaigns via text message to avoid email vendor protections to deliver phishing directly to victims.