Cyber security agency warns bank customers of phishing attack

Tribune News Service

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New Delhi, August 11

CERT-In, the country’s top cyber security agency, has warned that scammers have been targeting bank customers in India using “a novel phishing attack” to collect sensitive banking information such as internet banking credentials, mobile number and one time password (OTP).

The agency in its latest advisory said, the malicious activity was being carried out using “the ngrok platform”, a unique web application. “It has been observed that Indian banking customers are being targeted by a new type of phishing attack using ngrok platform,” it said.

In the advisory, which was issued on Tuesday, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said, “The malicious actors have abused the ngrok platform to host phishing websites impersonating internet banking portals of Indian banks.”

Phishing denotes to the fraud when an attacker, masquerading as a trusted entity, tricks a victim into clicking evil links to steal passwords, login credentials and one-time password (OTP).

In the advisory, the agency further elaborated that using these phishing websites, “malicious actors” collect sensitive information of the customers such as internet banking credentials, mobile number and OTP to perform “fraudulent transactions”.

It said, “The phishing attacks have been seen to be triggered through SMSes containing links that end with ngrok.io/xxxbank.”

Explaining this with an example SMS, the agency said, “Dear customer your xxx bank account will be suspended! Please Re KYC Verification Update click here link http://446bdf227fc4.ngrok.io/xxxbank.”

To counter such attack, the agency asked users to “install and maintain updated anti-virus and anti-spyware software, filtering tools (anti-virus and content-based filtering), firewall and filtering services”. It has also asked users to update spam filters with latest spam mail contents.

“Customers should report any unusual activity in their account immediately to the respective bank,” it said and asked them to report it to incident@cert-in.org.in.