A new Phishing threat hits Saudi Arabian Government
It seems that no organization is immune to cyber criminals as Saudi Arabian government has joined the list of organizations which were hit by cyber-espionage.
A new spear phishing attack aimed at Saudi Arabian governmental organization has planted a cyber-espionage malware on government computers via infected Word document which is in Arabic language. When opened, the file will only infect the victim’ s system but it also sends the same phishing file to other contacts through the victim’ s Outlook inbox.
The attack was found by Malwarebytes when the company' s cyber security software was activated, and the company had addressed the issue on its blog. Since the situation is still evolving, Malwarebytes refrained from disclosing the agencies involved with the attack, and it even kept off from speculating about the origin of the attack. The company is also unaware of the motive behind the attack.
“ The malware is designed to mine/steal files from the victim machine, and send them encrypted to a couple of servers,” a company spokesperson said.
This isn’ t the only cyber-attack that Saudi Arabia had faced in a long time as a similar attack targeted at its energy sector few years ago.
Similar to almost all the spear-phishing attacks, the malicious mail uses a social engineering scheme which persuades the recipient to not only open the attached word doc, but to enable the macros setting &ndash effectively bypassing the built-in security that would have halted the attack.
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