News
Scottish Power Twitter account hacked - Faronics comments
January 2013 by Bimal Parmar, VP of marketing, Faronics
On Friday, a Scottish Power Twitter account was compromised, with hackers using social engineering scams to convince followers into providing their Twitter login details. The 2,000 followers were sent direct messages which included a malicious link that directed them to a convincing phishing website.
Bimal Parmar, VP of marketing at IT security specialist Faronics, said:
“A scam like this shows just how easy it is to be targeted by a cyber attack these days. Worryingly, users tend to believe that they can spot a bogus message, however in reality many cannot. If the hacker pretends to be a trusted person or organisation, and the mail content is highly relevant, then it is easy to see how users can be duped. What is even more concerning is that users are placing large amounts of trust in social networking sites, therefore it’s likely that many followers who received this message from Scottish Power would believe it to be genuine – a frightening thought when cybercriminals are in fact increasingly using sites such as Twitter to deceive users into unwittingly providing personal information.
“At the moment there seems to be a high level of naivety when it comes to modern day cybercrime. Indeed, a recent survey estimated that more than half of respondents do not believe they are at risk of cyber fraud, with 13 percent willing to share passwords with a stranger online if the request appeared to be genuine. This is startling when considering the large number of high-profile spear phishing cases, such as this one, are published in our papers on a daily basis. It is this gullibility that hackers depend and thrive on. Only by raising awareness of what the dangers are when opening unidentified emails or clicking on unknown links, regardless of who they appear to come from, do we have any chance of avoiding falling victim to an attack such as this.”
