Criminals are opportunists, ready to exploit any perceived weakness, from humanitarian efforts to presidential campaigns. Recently, Netcraft has been monitoring a series of attacks surrounding the Trump campaign, particularly following two developments: the May 21st announcement of crypto donations and the May 31st trial verdict that led to a huge surge in real donations, overwhelming the Trump campaign’s actual infrastructure.
Following these events, Netcraft has identified donation scams impersonating the Trump campaign, featuring dozens of malicious domains distributed in phishing and smishing campaigns. With millions of emails and texts sent by the real campaign, scammers are exploiting recent interest to trick would-be donors into visiting a lookalike domain.
Netcraft also used our proprietary peer-to-peer messaging reconnaissance to engage in a direct conversation with a “Trump National Committee” scammer, who revealed various points of actionable threat intelligence, including mule bank accounts, payment app details, email addresses, and more. In addition to collecting critical data that can be utilized to disrupt attacks and dismantle infrastructure, this dialogue with the scammers confirms a popular concern that criminals are leveling up and using AI to create better, faster, and more believable scams.
Let’s examine how quickly criminals deploy these campaigns, adapt to new information, and are getting better while they do.
Legitimate Crypto Support
As announced in late May, the Trump campaign accepts cryptocurrency donations via Coinbase Payments. This technology is provided through Coinbase and is available to any “federally accredited donor” to make payments via Ethereum-based cryptocurrencies or through balances held at Coinbase including Bitcoin and a large variety of more esoteric coins.
When the trial verdict was announced on May 31st, the Trump campaign immediately directed all incoming traffic to its site to the donation pages in order to capitalize on support from donors across the country. The campaign collected more …
Organizing events that gather cybersecurity leaders requires significant effort and sponsorships. Unfortunately, some events and communities exclude CISOs who work for security vendors. This stance, though well-meaning, harms the industry and allows hidden conflicts of interest to go unchecked. Here’s why and how we can address this issue to improve such events and the community…