A sophisticated social engineering attack undertaken by an Iranian-state aligned actor targeted think tanks, journalists, and professors. The attack chain involved the threat actor posing as British scholars in an attempt to entice the target into clicking on a registration link to an online conference that’s engineered to capture a variety of credentials from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo. Security firm Proofpoint attributed the campaign called “Operation SpoofedScholars” to the advanced persistent threat tracked as TA453. The government cyber warfare group is suspected to carry out intelligence efforts on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/iranian-hackers-posing-as-scholars.html