Phishing scam insights with Morten Kjaersgaard CEO Heimdal Security

The Irish Tech News Podcast

We have all heard of the increase in phishing scams via emails and texts that are designed to steal financial details from you. One of the most popular ones claims to be from An Post and in the run up to Christmas more and more of these will be received. I have gotten numerous texts from Irish mobile phone numbers over the last few weeks stating “ANPOST: Payment of import duty/tax & advance fee of €1.99 is required for your shipment to be processed.

Pay securely via xxxxxxxxxx”. The xxxxxxxxxx at the end of the text is actually a link to a website where your payment is processed.

Another person who received one of these phishing attacks is Morten Kjaersgaard CEO Heimdal Security, a cybersecurity company based in Copenhagen. Morten received an email supposedly coming from the GLS courier company, informing him of an incoming package in his name and for the delivery of which he had to make a small payment.

Morten talks to Ronan about the email he received, what he did next, how the scam works and how his research and development team managed to infiltrate the attackers.

More about the phishing scam:

The email/text is a phishing scam and clicking the link within the email/text takes the recipient to a phishing web page with credit/debit card inputs for the victim to execute the payment for the package delivery. Once the recipient fills in their credit/debit card details, all the data is then sent to the attackers through a Telegram chatbot, onto a public Telegram channel, which basically makes the 3.000 stolen credit/debit cards to date visible not just to the attackers but also to anyone else who is aware of the Telegram channel’s existence.