Conference/Summit Scams

Conferences and summits are a great way to get people together that have similar services, needs, wants and interests. Cybercriminals know that ticket sales, communication, and schedules are communicated online and through emails, messages, or phone calls for these events.  Cybercriminals can benefit from these conferences to obtain information. They have crafted phishing scams to trick these conference attendees to give over sensitive information and download malware on their devices.   

In Belgium, there was a Women’s Political Leaders Summit that cybercriminals took advantage of by sending a phishing scam post summit. In this scam, they used verbiage explaining that they can download pictures of the summit on their website. Cybercriminals created a malicious website that looked like the real one and made the email look very legit. When the attendees downloaded what they thought was just photos they also downloaded malware. With this malware downloaded on their devices, cybercriminals can essentially spy on the person seeing their keystrokes, sensitive data, and personal data.

Tips:

• Always stop to think before you click on a link or download an attachment.
• This can affect any type of conference or summit and is not limited to this Women’s Summit.
• Keeping your software and devices up to date can help to make sure security patches are working properly.
• If you are unsure, it never hurts to verify. In this case you could have called the company that put the conference on by accessing their number from looking up the website on a trusted browser and asking them if they sent out an email to download the pictures from the summit.

Learn more tips like this and train your employees with our Security Awareness Training Program.