On Friday, December 16, Russian Telegram users fell victim to a large-scale phishing campaign aimed at stealing access to accounts, according to the Telegram channel SecAtor.
Victims received messages from trusted contacts about a promotional Premium subscription. After clicking the link, they received a ‘activation code’ which actually granted the attacker access to the account.
The phisher subsequently sent similar messages to all of the victim’s contacts and removed them from the sent list.
A similar attack was reported in WhatsApp, according to SecAtor.
Preliminary data indicate that accounts without two-factor authentication were compromised.
Victims are advised to terminate sessions on other devices via Telegram settings, change their password and enable 2FA immediately.
Earlier, ForkLog reported that the Telegram administration began to disable Premium subscriptions, purchased from third parties. The scheme to sell them outside the official bot was organized by three Moscow schoolchildren.
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