The Worst Scams of 2021 | #phishing | #scams | #education | #technology | #infosec

The YouTube Collaboration Scam

The good news about some phishing scams is that you don’t really have to worry about a lot of them, as they are often geared towards particular professions. The bad news is that this targeted approach makes it a lot harder to know whether or not you’re a potential victim of the scam until it’s too late. At least, that’s the case with this particularly clever phishing scam that was aimed at YouTube creators.

If you know anything about YouTubers, it’s that they love to collaborate. This scam takes advantage of that by sending fake collaboration emails for anti-virus software, VPNs, music players, photo editing apps, or online games. Once the victim clicks on the collaboration opportunity, the scammers hijack their account, selling it to the highest bidder or using it to broadcast other scams.

The scam was pretty widespread too. Propagated primarily through Gmail at first, Google announced that its Threat Analysis Group (TAG) had blocked 1.6 million emails from the campaign to protect its YouTube brethren, and displayed 62,000 Safe Browsing phishing page warnings, blocked 2,400 files, and successfully restored 4,000 accounts.”