What is Voice Phishing?

What is Voice Phishing & How to Avoid Voice Phishing in 2023

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Phishing, or in particular, voice phishing (also known as “vishing”)is technique criminals use to obtain personal and financial information via phone calls, emails and other unsolicited messages. Scammers use random numbers to call people and lure them into giving up their personal or financial information.

For example, a scammer may call someone disguised as a bank employee and try to get your secret PIN by saying that your credit card or account has been hacked and that they’re trying to fix it. Voice fishing has become very common over the years.

In the span of just four years (2012-2016), a group of voice phishers stole hundreds of millions of dollars and personal information from more than 50,000 people by pretending to be the IRS and immigration officials on the phone.

You can be the next target of the upcoming wave of voice phising. So you should be ready for it. Here are some tips and suggestions that can help you avoid voice phishing.

How to Protect Yourself from Vishing

There are a few precautions you should always take in advance in order to avoid being phished. While con artists will always find new ways and be persistent in their attempts to scam you, as long as you use common sense and stick closely to the following procedures, you should be good.

1. Don’t Talk to Strangers (or Robots)

Here are a few basic pointers on how to answer calls:

Do not pick up the phone if the number is unfamiliar. Put the caller through to voicemail and pay close attention to their message if you’re unsure about returning the call. Spoofing caller ID and phone numbers gives the recipient a false sense of safety.

Hang up and put that number on your block list if you’ve answered a strange call.

Don’t ever call someone back. Consult official sources such as credit card providers, customer service websites, and online directories for contact information.

2. Slow down, think before you act

It is human nature to trust those with whom one interacts. Our instincts prevent us from pausing to consider, “My caller ID indicates this is my bank; the caller knows details about me and says they’re from my bank…maybe this isn’t my bank?” However, it would help if you did that.

Suppose you have any doubts about the legitimacy of a call. In that case, you should disconnect, look up the number of the organization you believe you were speaking with, and call them immediately. Banks also often roll out a list of popular fake numbers that have been circulating around moonlighting as the real number, so make sure you’re up to date on all fronts.

3. Don’t press buttons or respond to prompts

Never interact with a message that appears automated by pressing buttons or answering questions. You can remove yourself from our list by pressing two or requesting to speak with an operator by responding with “yes.” Scammers often use these tactics to identify possible targets for more robocalls. They may record your voice so they can use it to access your account information via a voice-activated phone menu.

4. Don’t disclose your Passwords or Login Information

Hackers employ vishing techniques to con victims by requesting private data such as debit card/bank account data, login information, passwords, or social security number. It’s not uncommon for them to use techniques like appealing to victims’ sympathy (“I’m in real trouble, and you’re the only person I could think to call”) or attracting them in with the promise of special offers (“If you haven’t found that perfect Christmas gift yet, have I got a deal for you!”).

These manipulations often involve using fake IDs and falsely claiming to be someone they are not. It is vital to note that banks and other financial organizations would never demand debit/credit card information, user names, and credentials over the phone.

Consequently, keep your PIN, credit card verification number (CVV), and one-time password (OTP) secret. You should be aware of possible phishing attacks if you frequently receive calls or texts asking for personal information.

5. Use a caller ID app

The native caller ID systems of both Google and Apple have experienced profound development over the years. Nevertheless, numerous spam calls and fake IDs cannot be effectively managed by the Android or iOS operating systems. The proliferation of VoIP services has made it simple for con artists to generate fake phone numbers.

Because of their hidden identities, they give little indication of their location when making a call. To better recognize and reject unwanted calls, quality caller ID software can be quite helpful. Truecaller could be the best solution for both Android and iOS devices.

Truecaller has been downloaded over 500 million times and is used by over two billion people every month. Only legitimate phone numbers and those with a spam track record are prohibited. It is possible to report a phone number to their database if you believe it is being used in a vishing scam.

6. Ask questions

Ask for identification and company information verification if the caller claims to have a free reward or offers to sell you something. Block if the caller declines to provide the requested information. Before giving out any personal information, ensure the caller has given you accurate information.

Be vigilant in your tone and demeanor, even if you’re in the wrong you need to make sure you’re asking the right questions. Don’t feel out of place or nervous as it is your right to inquire about any suspicious activity. Improvise as you go and keep the second point in mind; slow down and think before you talk.

7. Register your phone number with the Do Not Call Registry

Informing telemarketers that you do not want to receive calls at your residence or mobile device is as easy as adding your number to a free registry. Most legitimate businesses will refrain from calling those on this list. Thus, any contact from a telemarketing service is almost certainly a vishing scam. The FTC offers a dedicated website where you can register your home or mobile number for free.

8. Never give remote computer access

To gain access to your computer, a visher can claim they need to remove malware or address another problem that requires them to use your computer. Without first confirming their identity as a member of the IT department, you should never let anyone else access your computer.

9. Report suspicious incidents

Multiple victims are often subjected to the same scam by the visher. If you think your company or institution is the subject of a vishing attack, you should notify the proper authorities immediately.

10. Be suspicious of unsolicited phone calls

It’s crucial to encourage people to be cautious and attentive when answering their phones, especially since more people are working from home, so more calls will be received randomly. Make sure everyone on your team knows how to recognize a vishing scam and what to do if one is attempted.

11. Be aware of fear-mongering

If a caller tries to generate a feeling of stress and fear, it suggests you’re most likely interacting with a scammer. Legitimate professional agents wouldn’t behave in such a way, as they’re taught to maintain composure and practicality even in high-stakes circumstances involving fraud prevention.

However, con artists are smart and know how to play on your concerns to get their way. These con artists are aware that fear causes us to make unwise choices. End the call and find the real number for the company to report the call.

12. Verify any sensitive information request by calling a known number

Do not give up any personal information, not even your date of birth, if you get a call from a number you don’t recognize or a person you recognize but aren’t expecting to call you, particularly if the caller wants you to verify your identity, by giving them any information, including your name. Scammers want you to respond and provide your personal information.

Final Thoughts

Voice phishing attacks are on the rise and can damage individuals, businesses, and organizations. Be aware of any suspicious phone calls and always verify the caller’s authenticity before providing it to anyone. Register your phone number with the Do Not Call Registry to avoid most telemarketing scams.

Finally, if you think a caller may be trying to scam you, stay calm and do not provide any personal or sensitive information. Report the incident to authorities or the security staff at your organization so they can protect other targets. With these tips in mind, you’ll be better equipped to stay safe from vishing scams in the future.

Study shows attackers can use ChatGPT to significantly enhance phishing and BEC scams

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Security researchers have used the GPT-3 natural language generation model and the ChatGPT chatbot based on it to show how such deep learning models can be used to make social engineering attacks such as phishing or business email compromise scams harder to detect and easier to pull off.

The study, by researchers with security firm WithSecure, demonstrates that not only can attackers generate unique variations of the same phishing lure with grammatically correct and human-like written text, but they can build entire email chains to make their emails more convincing and can even generate messages using the writing style of real people based on provided samples of their communications.

“The generation of versatile natural-language text from a small amount of input will inevitably interest criminals, especially cybercriminals — if it hasn’t already,” the researchers said in their paper. “Likewise, anyone who uses the web to spread scams, fake news or misinformation in general may have an interest in a tool that creates credible, possibly even compelling, text at super-human speeds.”

What is GPT-3?

GPT-3 is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to generate human-like responses based on much smaller inputs known as prompts. These prompts can be simple, such as a question or instruction to write something on a topic, but they can also be much more detailed giving the model more context on how it should produce a response. The art of crafting such refined prompts to achieve very specific and high quality responses is known as prompt engineering.

GPT-3 was originally developed in 2020 by researchers from artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI. Access to it via an API only became more widely available in 2021, yet widespread use was still restricted. That changed in late November with the launch of ChatGPT, a public chatbot based on GPT-3.5 that used refinements such as supervised learning and reinforcement learning.

Generating phishing messages with GPT-3

The WithSecure researchers began their research a month before ChatGPT was released by using lex.page, an online word processor with inbuilt GPT-3 functionality for autocomplete and other functions. Their study continued after the chatbot was released, including prompt engineering attempts to bypass the filters and restrictions that OpenAI put in place to limit the generation of harmful content.

One obvious use of such a tool can be the ease with which attackers can generate phishing messages without having to employ writers who know English, but it goes much deeper than that. In mass phishing attacks, but even in more targeted ones where the number of victims is smaller, the text or lure in the email is usually identical. This makes it easy for security vendors and even automated filters to build detection rules based on the text. Because of this, attackers know they have a limited time to hook victims before their emails are flagged as spam or malware and are blocked or removed from inboxes. With tools like ChatGPT, however, they can write a prompt and generate unlimited unique variants of the same lure message and even automate it so that each phishing email is unique.

The more complex and long a phishing message is, the more likely it is that attackers will make grammatical errors or include weird phrasing that careful readers will pick up on and become suspicious. With messages generated by ChatGPT, this line of defense that relies on user observation is easily defeated at least as far as the correctness of the text is concerned.

Detecting that a message was written by an AI model is not impossible and researchers are already working on such tools. While these might work with current models and be useful in some scenarios, such as schools detecting AI-generated essays submitted by students, it’s hard to see how they can be applied for email filtering because people are already using such models to write business emails and simplify their work.

“The problem is that people will probably use these large language models to write benign content as well,” WithSecure Intelligence Researcher Andy Patel tells CSO. “So, you can’t detect. You can’t say that something written by GPT-3 is a phishing email, right? You can only say that this is an email that was written by GPT-3. So, by introducing detection methods for AI generated written content, you’re not really solving the problem of catching phishing emails.”

Attackers can take it much further than writing simple phishing lures. They can generate entire email chains between different people to add credibility to their scam. Take, for example, the following prompts used by the WithSecure researchers:

“Write an email from [person1] to [person2] verifying that deliverables have been removed from a shared repository in order to conform to new GDPR regulations.”

“Write a reply to the above email from [person2] to [person1] clarifying that the files have been removed. In the email, [person2] goes on to inform [person1] that a new safemail solution is being prepared to host the deliverables.”

“Write a reply to the above email from [person1] to [person2] thanking them for clarifying the situation regarding the deliverables and asking them to reply with details of the new safemail system when it is available.”

“Write a reply to the above email from [person2] to [person1] informing them that the new safemail system is now available and that it can be accessed at [smaddress]. In the email, [person2] informs [person1] that deliverables can now be reuploaded to the safemail system and that they should inform all stakeholders to do so.”

“Write an email from [person1] forwarding the above to [person3]. The email should inform [person3] that, after the passing of GDPR, the email’s author was contractually obliged to remove deliverables in bulk, and is now asking major stakeholders to reupload some of those deliverables for future testing. Inform the recipient that [person4] is normally the one to take care of such matters, but that they are traveling. Thus the email’s author was given permission to contact [person3] directly. Inform the recipient that a link to a safemail solution has already been prepared and that they should use that link to reupload the latest iteration of their supplied deliverable report. Inform [person3] that the link can be found in the email thread. Inform the recipient that the safemail link should be used for this task, since normal email is not secure. The writing style should be formal.”

The chatbot generated a credible and well-written series of emails with email subjects that preserve the Re: tags, simulating an email thread that culminates with the final email to be sent to the victim – [person3].

How ChatGPT could enhance business email compromise campaigns

Impersonating multiple identities in a fake email thread to add credibility to a message is a technique that’s already being used by sophisticated state-sponsored attackers as well as cybercriminal groups. For example, the technique has been used by a group tracked as TA2520, or Cosmic Lynx, that specializes in business email compromise (BEC).

In BEC scams the attackers insert themselves into existing business email threads by using compromised accounts or spoofing the participants' email addresses. The goal is to convince employees, usually from an organization’s accounting or finance department, to initiate money transfers to the attacker-controlled accounts. A variation of this attack is called CEO fraud, where attackers impersonate a senior executive who is out of office and request an urgent and sensitive payment from the accounting department usually due to a situation that arose on a business trip or during a negotiation.

One obvious limitation of these attacks is that the victims might be familiar with the writing styles of the impersonated persons and be able to tell that something is not right. ChatGPT can overcome that problem, too, and is capable of “transferring” writing styles.

For example, it’s easy for someone to ask ChatGPT to write a story on a particular topic in the style of a well-known author whose body of work was likely included in the bot’s training data. However, as seen previously, the bot can also generate responses based on provided samples of text. The WithSecure researchers demonstrate this by providing a series of real messages between different individuals in their prompt and then instruct the bot to generate a new message using the style of those previous messages.

“Write a long and detailed email from Kel informing [person1] that they need to book an appointment with Evan regarding KPIs and Q1 goals. Include a link [link1] to an external booking system. Use the style of the text above.”

One can imagine how this could be valuable to an attacker who managed to break into the email account of an employee and download all messages and email threads. Even if that employee is not a senior executive, they likely have some messages in their inbox from such an executive they could then choose to impersonate. Sophisticated BEC groups are known to lurk inside networks and read communications to understand the workflows and relationships between different individuals and departments before crafting their attack.

Generating some of these prompts requires the user to have a good understanding of English. However, another interesting finding is that ChatGPT can be instructed to write prompts for itself based on examples of previous output. The researchers call this “content transfer.” For example, attackers can take an existing phishing message or a legitimate email message, provide it as input and tell the bot to: “Write a detailed prompt for GPT-3 that generates the above text. The prompt should include instructions to replicate the written style of the email.” This will produce a prompt that will generate a variation of the original message while preserving the writing style.

The researchers also experimented with concepts such as social opposition, social validation, opinion transfer, and fake news to generate social media posts that discredit and harass individuals or cause brand damage to businesses, generate messages meant to legitimize scams, and generate convincing fake news articles of events that were not part of the bots training set. These are meant to show the potential for abuse even with the filters and safeguards put in place by OpenAI and the bot’s limited knowledge of current events.

“Prompt engineering is an emerging field that is not fully understood,” the researchers said. “As this field develops, more creative uses for large language models will emerge, including malicious ones. The experiments demonstrated here prove that large language models can be used to craft email threads suitable for spear phishing attacks, ‘text deepfake’ a person’s writing style, apply opinion to written content, instructed to write in a certain style, and craft convincing looking fake articles, even if relevant information wasn’t included in the model’s training data. Thus, we have to consider such models a potential technical driver of cybercrime and attacks.”

Furthermore, these language models could be combined with other tools such as text-to-speech and speech-to-text to automate other attacks such as voice phishing or account hijacking by calling customer support departments and automating the interactions. There are many examples of attacks such as SIM swapping that involve attackers tricking customer support representatives over the phone.

GPT natural language models likely to improve greatly

Patel tells CSO that this is likely just the beginning. The GPT-4 model is likely already under development and training, and it will make GPT-3 look primitive, just like GPT-3 was a huge advancement over GPT-2. While it might take some time for the API for GPT-4 to become publicly available, it’s likely that researchers are already trying to replicate the weights of the model in an open-source form. The weights are the result of training such a machine learning model on what is likely exabytes of data, a time-consuming and highly expensive task. Once that training is complete, weights are what allow the model to run and produce output.

“To actually run the model, if you would have those weights, you’d need a decent set of cloud instances, and that’s why those things are behind an API. What we predict is that at some point you will be able to run it on your laptop. Not in the near future, obviously. Not in the next year or two, but work will be done to make those models smaller. And I think obviously there’s a large driving business for us to be able to run those models on the phone

Post Office warns public vs. phone call scam

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MANILA – The Philippine Post Office on Wednesday cautioned the public not to fall prey to a fraudulent phone call from individuals pretending to be part of the postal corporation.

In a public advisory, the Post Office said it will never call its clients for any financial transaction.

The Post Office warned that scammers are using their computer skills to configure calls and make it appear that these are legitimate calls from the postal corporation’s Customer Service Hotline, (02) 8288-7678.

“This official number, however, is being used by the Post Office for the sole purpose of entertaining inbound calls from the mailing public who are tracing the whereabouts of their mail or parcels,” the Post Office said.

“It is never used for outgoing or outbound calls for verifications on senders or addressees of postal matters,” it added.

The warning was issued, after three private citizens recently went to Cebu Post Office to inquire about the dubious phone calls which were confirmed to be “spoofed or cloned calls with an end view of extortion.”

The Post Office told the public not to entertain spoofed telephone calls by the scammer dubbed as “Mr. Vishing (voice phishing),” saying the scheme is to trick potential victims into giving personal information and money by instilling fear in them.

“Based on the initial information gathered, the modus operandi began in November 2022, asking would-be victims for their personal information through text or online messaging. In this case, the callers would then tell the targets that they ‘had discovered an outbound mail or parcel containing illegal substances purportedly sent by the prospective victim through the postal service’. They then claim that these parcels are bound to Malaysia, Thailand or any foreign country but were allegedly ‘shipped and intercepted at Cebu Central Post Office’ or at any post office,” it said.

“‘Mr. Vishing’ would then refer them to a ‘local police’ who would then use their social engineering skills to instill fear on these victims for them to avoid ‘legal entanglements’. The victims are then duped or coerced (even by video calls) to shell out huge amounts of money for protection to avoid trial and possible imprisonment,” the Post Office said.

The Post Office advised the public not to give personal information over the phone to avoid falling prey to “Mr. Vishing.”

“It is best and wise to check first the authenticity of the calls, emails, or texts that they receive from proper and legitimate sources or can access valuable information available online against vishing, phishing and other frauds,” it said.

The Post Office already informed the Department of Information and Communications Technology and the National Telecommunications Commission to investigate the fraudulent scheme.

It also sought the assistance of the Philippine National Police and its current telephone service provider to address the supposed package scam. (PNA)