A little social engineering goes a long way if you’re someone trying to extract information or money from people, and that’s close to what groups of hackers are doing to financial and investment firms according to a new report from the Google Threat Intelligence Group. Though it’s not quite social engineering. If you’re unfamiliar with social engineering, it’s where someone pretends to be someone they’re not in an attempt to either extract money from a target or extract information from a target, so that information can then be used to extract money. That’s the general goal for people trying to social engineer someone.
Those times when you get phone calls and you answer, and it’s someone pretending to be from your bank and asking you personal questions, that’s social engineering, and those questions may seem harmless but it’s usually to narrow down possible passwords. According to Google’s latest report, groups of hackers are targeting firms like Blackstone, Bain Capital, Apollo Global Management, and a few others.
Google says there are four groups of hackers in these financial firm hacks
In its report, Google says there are four groups of hackers, which it calls Falcon, Helix, Pink, and Redact. What these groups are doing is calling up employees that work at these financial and investment firms, and then they’re pretending to be IT employees or someone who works for the company’s help desk.
From that point, they’re attempting to get people to login with credentials to a spoofed website, which then gives hackers the logins they need to get in and get what they’re really seeking, which is information on the victims that they have then used to try and extort those victims for money. After getting data, some of these groups then threatened to release it unless they were paid. Google doesn’t give complete or exact figures, but it does note that at least one of the hacking groups received around $10 million in fund to a crypto wallet associated with the group within the last 90 days.
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