Imagine receiving an email, delivered to your business email address, offering a “Partnership Affiliate Offer.” Would you open it? Oh, come on, of course you would! Your curiosity invariably gets the better of you all the time. But when you read this email, you pause and then shudder. What the heck? Here’s the offer:
If you can install and launch our Demonware Ransomware in any computer, company main Windows Server, physically or remotely, (there’s) 40 percent for you, a million dollars for you in Bitcoin.
A researcher at Abnormal Security engaged with the bad actor behind this poorly written email offer for several days. The researcher documented how he tied the email back to a young man in Nigeria who acknowledged he was trying to save up money to help fund a new social network he was building.
Funny, right? Unfortunately, Business Email Compromise (BEC) or CEO Scams in which crooks, mainly based in Africa and Southeast Asia, spoof communications from executives at the target firm in a bid to initiate unauthorized international wire transfers are bigger business than the blitz of ransomware attacks that have made headlines recently.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reports that BEC scams increased to more than $1.8 billion in 2020. These extortion attempts have proven to be highly profitable for cybercriminals.
And, of course, it is incredibly humorous that this latest cyber scam is authored by a Nigerian because the classic email scams began decades ago. Referred to as the “419 scam” (because of the area code), the “Nigerian prince” emails requested your assistance because of a will or lottery win. If you were willing to engage in helping the email author obtain the funds, you’d be rewarded with a percentage of the total amount.
What I found amazing while researching this article is that these 419 emails continue in only slightly modified formats to this very day. That someone has taken the initiative (albeit warped) to reboot this for the Bitcoin era is not surprising — but enterprising.
Bottom line: Be extremely careful of unsolicited email offers!