The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre has cautioned corporates and finance professionals against Boss Scam or CEO impersonation fraud. Home Ministry said in a statement that there has been sharp rise in complaints on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP) relating to the takeover of WhatsApp accounts of professionals and businesspersons through malicious files circulated in the guise of account statements and regulatory communications. It said that incidents following an identical modus operandi have been reported from multiple States, including Delhi, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. In the reported incidents, victims receive a compressed (.zip) file over WhatsApp, SMS or e-mail bearing names such as Statement of Account.zip, RBI.zip, or MCA.zip.
The accompanying message is crafted to appear either as a routine account statement or as an urgent notice from a regulator such as the Reserve Bank of India and Ministry of Corporate Affairs, demanding compliance within a very short timeframe. When the file is extracted and opened on a Windows desktop or laptop, a Trojan is installed which compromises the device and hijacks the victim’s active WhatsApp Web session. The compromised WhatsApp account is misused to automatically circulate the same malicious file to all the contacts and groups of the victim.
