Pretext

Conference Speaker

A new industry conference is looking for speakers/panelists about a topic related to the target's job/expertise.

Methods
phone email sms voicemail chatbot physical
Payloads
doc docx xls xlsx ppt pptx pdf hta exe bat zip xss csrf click-once phishing page ole drive-by-download usb drop cloud hosted file
Goals
cred harvest malware physical access info gather bec
Description

The attacker creates an entire fake industry conference centered around the target's area of expertise or job title. The attacker then contacts the target, via email or phone, and invites them to participate on a panel or as a speaker. You'll need to conduct sufficient research on the individual to ensure that they would feel qualified enough to speak to a particular topic, so make sure they have sufficient professional experience in that field. It needs to be plausible that they'd be asked to speak, or at least that someone might think they could. This pretext relies heavily on playing to our victim's ego, so be sure to string in little sayings like 'your insight', 'you came highly recommended', 'top of the field', etc. Create a conference website and then the payload could be via document about the conference sent over email or website-based.

Example Email(s)
From: {FAKE CONFERENCE NAME} Conference
Subject: panelist for new {INDUSTRY} conference

Hi {FIRST NAME} - The new {CONFERENCE NAME} conference seeks to bring together industry experts and academics to {CONFERENCE PURPOSE}. We're in the process of putting together conference panels and thought the panel on {TOPIC RELATED TO VICTIM} might be of interest. Are you open to discussing being a panelist at our conference? Please let us know as soon as possible.

panel.pdf | X

Example Phone Call Script(s)

Victim:

Hello?

Attacker:

Hi, {TARGET}, this is {FAKE NAME} with the {CONFERENCE NAME} conference. How are you?

Victim:

Good... How can I help you?

Attacker:

Not sure if you're familiar with {CONFERENCE NAME}, but it's our inagural year running the {CONFERENCE NAME} conference. We're bringing together academic leaders and industry experts to {CONFERENCE PURPOSE}. At the moment, we're looking for speakers and panelists and our search committee stumbled upon your profile. Would you be open to exploring speaking or participating in a panel about {PANEL TOPIC}?

Victim:

Maybe.

Attacker:

Great. How would you feel about me sending you some more info via email and then setting up some time to discuss in a bit greater detail?
Example Payload Ideas

Fake calendar scheduling HTA to schedule time with the victim to discuss the panel you want them to participate on.

User tries to visit the conference website. This requires building a legitimate looking conference website. Shouldn't be too difficult though, since there are tons of templates out there.

A malicious PDF file with the fake panel information.

Analysis

This pretext plays to the target's ego. The best target is probably someone with a lot of career aspirations that hasn't been recognized yet.

Resources