State Bank of India (SBI), hackers of Chinese origin, targets SBI customers with phishing scams, asking them to update their KYC using a particular website link and offering gifts worth Rs 50 lakh from the bank via WhatsApp.

“All the domain names associated with the campaign have the registrant country like China,” the cybersecurity researchers team said

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The research wing of New Delhi-based think tank CyberPeace Foundation, along with Autobot Infosec Pvt Ltd, studied two such incidents on the name of SBI that some smartphone users faced.

In the first case of the text message requesting KYC verification, the landing page resembles the official SBI online page.

On clicking the “Continue to Login” button, it redirects the user to the full-kyc.php page, asking for confidential information like username, password and a captcha to login to the online banking.

“Following this, it asks for an OTP sent to the user’s mobile number. As soon as the OTP is entered, it redirects the user to another page that asks the users to enter some confidential information again, like account holder name, mobile number, date of birth. After entering the data, it redirects the user to an OTP page,” the researchers informed.

The research team concluded that the campaign is pretended to be launched from the State Bank of India but hosted on the third-party domain instead of the official website www.onlinesbi.com.

The overall layout of the web page used in the campaign is kept similar to the official SBI net banking site to lure the users.

The SBI was yet to react to the report.

In the second case of luring users to win attractive gifts, the team found that the WhatsApp message also redirects the user to a link.

“On the landing page, a congratulations message appears with an attractive photo of State Bank of India and asks users to participate in a quick survey to get a gift of Rs 50 lakh from the State bank of India,” the researchers informed.

At the bottom of the page, a section appears to be a Facebook comment section where many users have commented about how the offer is beneficial.

The Research teams investigated the URLs in a secured sandbox environment where the WhatsApp application was not installed. The researchers recommend that people should avoid opening such messages sent via social platforms.

“The URL manipulation showed that the webserver has directory listing enabled and found other links visible which proves that not only the SBI users, IDFC, PNB, IndusInd and Kotak bank users are also targeted by the same type of phishing scam,” the team noted.

In March this year, the same research team had pointed out that several users of the SBI were targeted in a phishing scam where hackers flooded them with suspicious text messages, requesting them to redeem their SBI credit points worth Rs 9,870.