A new and dangerous AI threat for all Gmail users is seen in the wild
Update, Oct. 13, 2024: This story, originally published Oct. 11, includes details of a new Google anti-scam alliance initiative, a new warning about legitimate-looking support scams and details of Google’s Advanced Protection Program to protect high-risk accounts.
Google has implemented increasingly sophisticated protections against those who would compromise your Gmail account—but hackers using AI-driven attacks are also evolving. According to Google’s own figures, there are currently more than 2.5 billion users of the Gmail service. No wonder, then, that it is such a target for hackers and scammers. Here’s what you need to know.
The Latest AI-Driven Gmail Attack Is Scary Good
Sam Mitrovic, a Microsoft solutions consultant, has issued a warning after almost falling victim to what is described as a “super realistic AI scam call” capable of tricking even the most experienced of users.
It all started a week before Mitrovic realized the sophistication of the attack that was targeting him. “I received a notification to approve a Gmail account recovery attempt,” Mitrovic recounts in a blog post warning other Gmail users of the threat in question. The need to confirm an account recovery, or a password reset, is a notorious phishing attack methodology intended to drive the user to a fake login portal where they need to enter their credentials to report the request as not initiated by them.
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Unsurprisingly, then, Mitrovic wasn’t falling for this and ignored the notification that appeared to originate from the U.S. and a missed phone call, pertaining to be from Google in Sydney, Australia, some 40 minutes later. So far, so relatively straightforward and easy to avoid. Then, almost exactly a week later, the fun started in earnest—another notification request for account recovery approval followed by a telephone call 40 minutes later. This time, Mitrovic didn’t miss the call and instead picked up: an American voice, claiming to be from Google support, confirmed that there was suspicious activity on the Gmail account.
“He asks if I’m traveling,” Mitrovic said, “when I said no, he asks if I logged in from Germany, to which I reply no.” All of this to engender trust in the caller and fear in the recipient. This is when things turned dark fast and really rather clever in the overall scheme of phishing things. The so-called Google support person informed Mitrovic that an attacker had accessed his Gmail account for the past 7 days, and had already downloaded account data. This rang alarm bells as Mitrovic recalled the recovery notification and missed call from a week earlier.
Googling the phone number he was being called from while speaking, Mitrovic discovered that it did, indeed, lead to Google business pages. This alone is a clever tactic likely to fool plenty of unsuspecting users caught up in the panic of the moment, as it wasn’t a Google support number but rather about getting calls from Google Assistant. “At the start of the call, you’ll hear the reason for the call and that the call is from Google. You can expect the call to come from an automated system or, in some cases, a manual operator,” the 100% genuine page helpfully informs the reader.
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Another Google Support Scam Driven By AI Sparks Warning To Gmail Users
Garry Tan, the founder of venture capital firm and startup accelerator Y Combinator, has taken to X, formerly known as Twitter, to issue a warning about another phishing scam that he described as being “pretty elaborate” which also leverages AI so as to present itself as believable. Once again, as with the scam that almost fooled Sam Mitrovic, a security consultant remember, this latest warning concerns contact from a so-called Google support technician. I wouldn’t go as far as one commenter on X who suggested the giveaway was that Google doesn’t have any support for users, but it’s not that too far from the truth when it comes to these scams: Google support will not contact you out of the blue like this. “Do not click yes on this dialog,” Tan warned, “you will be phished.”
Don’t be knee-jerked into clicking yes
In the case of the scam that targeted Tan, the supposed Google support person claimed that the company had received a death certificate and a family member was attempting to recover his account. The caller, in other words, and only AI could be this stupid, was checking that the person answering was alive. “It’s a pretty elaborate ploy to get you to allow password recovery,” Tan went on to warn, but spotted that the account recovery screen he was presented with had a device field that displayed the name of a Google support worker rather than an actual device used to access the account. Tan suggested that whoever designed the interface for recovery should be employing some pretty basic regular expression checks, or even AI-based fraud detection, on the text field in question. “It’s trivial to check the device name for this,” he concluded. Part of the scam involved getting Tan to re-add his cellphone number as part of the verification process to trigger an account recovery dialog. Tan was, however, wise to this: “I’ve been SIM swapped, so know not to have my cell on my accounts ever,” Tan explained.
Using Google Forms To Make Contact Appear Legitimate
Fraudsters have also been seen abusing Google Forms, a free online tool that is part of Google Workspace, to create legitimate looking documents sent as part of support scams. By sending a copy of the form to the target address, using the response receipt option of Google Forms, the document is sent via genuine Google servers which adds legitimacy to the scam. Checking the email will show it as being from [email protected] for example, which acts to lower any red flags the recipient might have had. One such scam used such a form to mimic an account recovery password reset form, telling the target they would get a SMS notification from a named support agent and giving them the number to check. This double-legitimacy method is enough to fool plenty of people, lots of the time. In this case, the slip-up, and only then if the person on the receiving end was savvy enough to realize, was a confusingly complex and overlong password reset process.
Lessons To Be Learned From These Google Support Hack Near Misses
Mitrovic did the right thing, or at least the next best thing to hanging up, and asked the supposed support guy to send an email confirmation—an email which arrived soon after, from a Google domain and looking for all intents and purposes genuine. AT this point he noticed the to field contained a cleverly disguised address that wasn’t actually a Google domain but could, once again, easily fool those not of a technical bent.
The real giveaway for Mitrovic, however, was when the caller said hello and after no response said hello again. “At this point I released it as an AI voice as the pronunciation and spacing were too perfect,” Mitrovic said.
It’s well worth reading the original blog from Mitrovic as it contains much more technical detail and detective work that I don’t have the space to cover in this report. Knowledge is everything, and the threat intelligence provided by this consultant is genuinely invaluable for anyone who might find themselves in a similar situation: forearmed is forewarned.
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It’s almost a certainty that the attacker would have continued to a point where the so-called recovery process would be initiated, in truth this would be a cloned login portal capturing user credentials and likely the use of some kind of session cookie stealing malware to bypass two-factor authentication if that was in place.
Google Launches The Global Signal Exchange To Fight Scammers
Google has announced that it has joined forces with the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and the DNS Research Federation to form a new initiative in the battle against scammers. The Global Signal Exchange will act as an intelligence-sharing platform when it comes to scams and fraud, providing real-time insight into the cybercrime supply chain. As the first founding member of the Global Signal Exchange, Google hopes that the platform will become, in effect, a global clearinghouse for the kind of intelligence signals that are connected to bad actors and their attacks.
Amanda Storey, senior director of trust and safety at Google said that the collaboration “leverages the strengths of each partner.” With GASA having an extensive existing network of interested stakeholders and the DNS Research Foundation a data platform with more than 40 million existing signals, “GSE aims to improve the exchange of abuse signals, enabling faster identification and disruption of fraudulent activities across various sectors, platforms and services.”
The ultimate goal, Google confirmed, is to create a solution that not only operates at the almost unthinkable scale of the internet itself but does so in an efficient and, above all, user-friendly way. This means that qualifying organizations will be able to use it to hit back at scammers. Google already has plenty of experience in this field, with a long-established history of entering into partnerships to help fight fraud. Indeed, as part of the testing of the new Global Signal Exchange, Google shared more than 100,000 malicious URLs and consumed a staggering million scam signals for analysis. “We’ll start by sharing Google Shopping URLs that we have actioned under our scams policies,” Nafis Zebarjadi, Google’s account security product manager said, “and as we gain experience from the pilot, we will look to add data soon from other relevant Google product areas.”
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The Global Signal Exchange, or at least the engine that drives it, runs on the Google Cloud to enable all participants to share and consume intelligence signals while “benefiting from Google Cloud Platform’s Al capabilities to find patterns and match signals smartly,” Storey concluded.
Staying Safe From The Most Advanced Of Gmail Scams
AI deepfakes are not just used for porn and politics, they are used to perpetrate seemingly straightforward account takeovers such as in this case. Stay calm if you are approached by someone claiming to be from Google support, they won’t phone you so there’s a massive red flag right away, and no harm will come to you if you hang up. Use the tools at your disposal, ironically Google search itself and your Gmail account, to make checks during the call if you are concerned its could be genuine and ignoring it could cause harm. Search for the phone number, see where it’s really coming from. Check your Gmail activity to see what, if any, devices other than your own have been using the account. Take note of what Google says about staying safe from attackers using Gmail phishing scams. Most importantly, never let yourself be rushed into making a knee-jerk reaction, no matter how much urgency is injected into a conversation. It’s that sense of urgency that the attackers rely upon to swerve your normal good judgement and click a link or give up credentials.
Use Google’s Advanced Protection Program—Now With Passkey Support
I would also advise considering enrolment into Google’s Advanced Protection Program, designed for users such as journalists, activists and politicians who may be thought of as high-risk account holders. One of the downsides of the Advanced Protection Program had always been that it required the purchase of not one, but two hardware security keys to use when signing into the account. The financial burden was lifted recently earlier in the year when Google announced that passkey support was coming to Advanced Protection Program users.
Google’s Advanced Protection Program keeps phishing scams at bay
The combination of the protections brought by both of these technologies makes it something of a no-brainer for most people with a Google account, including all Gmail users. Here’s why. Signing into Google on any device requires the passkey when first used, which means that even if a hacker had got your username and account, without the device that passkey is stored on (your smartphone) and your biometrics needed to verify it, they could not sign in. Using this in conjunction with Advanced Protection Program enrolment, which restricts most non-Google apps and services from accessing your Gmail account data, also makes phished password and account recovery much harder to pull off. “If anyone tries to recover your account,” a Google spokesperson said, “Advanced Protection takes extra steps to verify your identity.” This means that it can take a few days to verify that you are who you say and get access to your Google account back. But it means that hackers can’t just scam their way into it either.
