China-based hackers luring Indians into fake Tata Motors scam

Cybersecurity researchers in India on Thursday said they have discovered a malicious free gift campaign pretending to be an offer from Tata Motors that is collecting users data and the campaign has been traced to Chinabased hackersThe research wing of New Delhibased CyberPeace Foundation received some links via WhatsApp related to a free gift offer from Tata Motors collecting browser and system information as well as the cookie data from the usersThe campaign is pretended to be an offer from Tata Motors but hosted on the thirdparty domain instead of the official website of Tata Motors which makes it more suspicious the research team said in a statementIf any user opens the link from a device like smartphones where WhatsApp application is installed the sharing features on the site will open the WhatsApp application on the device to share the linkThe prizes are kept really attractive to lure the laymen the team saidThe title of the fake website is Tata Motors Cars Celebrates sales exceeding 30 millionOn the landing page a congratulations message appears with an attractive photo of a Tata Safari car and asks users to participate in a quick survey to get a free TATA Safari vehicleAlso at the bottom of this page a section comes up which seems to be a Facebook comment section where many users have commented about how the offer is beneficial the research revealedAfter Clicking the OK button users are given three attempts to win the prizeAfter completing all the attempts it says that the user has won TATA SAFARICongratulations You did it You won the TATA SAFARI Clicking on the OK button it then instructs users to share the campaign on WhatsAppThe user then has to click the WhatsApp button in order to complete the progress bar After clicking on the green Complete registration button it redirects the user to multiple advertisements webpages and it varies each time the user clicks on the buttonAccording to the researchers cybercriminals used Cloudflare technologies to mask the real IP addresses of the frontend domain names used in the free gifts from Tata Motors campaignBut during the phases of investigation we have identified a domain name that was requested in the background and has been traced as belonging to China the researchers revealedCyberPeace Foundation a think tank and grassroot NGO of cyber security and policy experts along with Autobot Infosec Private Limited looked into this matter to realise that these websites are online fraudThe campaign is pretended to be an offer from Tata Motors but hosted on the thirdparty domain instead of the official website of Tata Motors which makes it more suspicious the Foundation saidThe Foundation recommended that people avoid opening such messages sent via social platformsThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever