WannaCry for Spamming and Phishing

Hackers are using social engineering techniques leveraging fear of wannacry in peoples mind to send spam mails and perform phishing attacks to harvest user credentials.

WannaCry is one of the largest ransomware cyber attack in the world till now. Wannacry allowed hackers to encrypt all the user data of your computer, and keep you away from accessing your data, until you make a payment to the hackers. Once you make the payment, they will send you the key for decrypting the data.

With in a short span of time it has  infected millions of computers and other windows devices in schools, IT industries, banks, hospitals, and government agencies. Wannacry was one hell of an attack the shook entire world.

Now hackers are making use of this fear in peoples mind to make them install malicious software claiming to detect or patch the vulnerabilities in windows system.

Hackers are sending malicious mails offering software updates for affected computers that will make the system secure, clicking the download link, the user will be redirected to a phishing page, where the user data will be harvested.

“During the second quarter of the year, we have seen that the main trends in spam and phishing attacks have continued to grow, The use of WannaCry in mass mailings proves that cyber criminals are very attentive and reactive to international events.” – Darya Gudkova, spam analyst expert at Kaspersky Lab.

After the attack, the amount of spam mails have vastly increased to a large number. It is said that the anti-phishing alert of Kaspersky was triggered 46,557,343 times on the computers of Kaspersky lab users itself.