Phishers Are Using 'Google Translate' to Steal Users' Data

Cybersecurity experts from Avanan discovered a new phishing campaign that deceives users by pretending to be Google Translate. Additionally, they discovered a large number of phishing emails, some of which were in Spanish. Furthermore, the emails are consistent with what one might anticipate from a phishing attempt - they claim to be from the victim's email provider and warn them that their identity has not been verified and unless they take quick action, they will lose access to their unread messages. More details According to Avanan researchers, this is common practice with phishing emails because the sense of urgency causes people to behave irrationally and carelessly, increasing their likelihood to click on a malicious link or download a dangerous attachment. Moreover, the threat actors then instruct the victims to click on a link supplied in the email itself to "confirm" their identity. Those who click the link are taken to a page that appears like Google Translate but is actually something else. After that, the victims must input their login information in the popup box at the top of the website. And the username/password combination entered there is immediately sent to the attackers. Additionally, the researchers claim that the bogus Translate page appears to be extremely real, and they add that the attackers used "a lot of Javascript" to make it so. Also, they concealed their true intentions by including the Unescape command. The experts concluded, "This attack has a little bit of everything. It has unique social engineering at the front end and it leverages a legitimate site to help get into the inbox. In addition, it uses trickery and obfuscation to confuse security services.” Therefore, they warned that users must exercise extreme caution to protect themselves from such attacks. Lastly, as a rule of thumb, emails that ask for immediate action from the user are typically phishing attempts. Hence, users should handle them with particular caution.