According to security firm Symantec a growing number of hackers are targeting professionals on LinkedIn. Investigation by Symantec found dozens of fake accounts on the social network, across a variety of industries.
Posing as recruiters, the fake accounts allow hackers to map the networks of business professionals and gain the trust of those in them. The security firm has worked with LinkedIn to remove all of the fake accounts it identified.
By making these connections, criminals can entice users to give up personal details, direct them to malware-laden websites and, if they can get their email addresses, launch spear-phishing campaigns - targeted emails that aim to steal personal information.
"LinkedIn users expect to be contacted by recruiters, so this ruse works out in the scammers' favour," it said in its report.
The researchers found that the fake profiles tended to be made up of text that had been copied and pasted from the profiles of real professionals. They used photos, often of women, pulled either from stock image sites or of real professionals.
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