An investigation published in a major foreign news portal confirms that the official website of the World Bank's Climate Smart Planning Platform (CSPP) project was hacked by two hackers and was then used to host a very well-designed PayPal phishing page.
According to this article, the CSPP project, which focuses on helping developing countries create and implement "climate-smart" policies, was ideal for phishing attacks since it used an Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificate from Comodo for the World Bank Group.
Since the website carried the EV and SSL certificates created for the World Bank Group, the phishing website was automatically considered quite trustworthy, and so visitors 'fell into the trap'.
The certificate is said to provide the 'highest level of trust' since it is offered after an extensive certification process. After this process, it bears the name of the holder.
Now, the PayPal phishing site tricks the visitor into logging in with their PayPal credentials. The data is then encrypted and intercepted, and the user is informed that the site was unable to load and display the user’s account, and is asked to confirm their personal information.
The site then asks the visitor to share their email address, full name, date of birth, and phone number.
Next, the user is asked to confirm their PayPal payment information, such as their credit card number, expiration date, CVV number, and 3D Secure password if the card requires verification. After collecting all of this information, the phishing site redirects the user to the legitimate PayPal website.
The phishing page was hosted at climatesmartplanning.org, and the fact that the green address bar in the browser showed the name “World Bank Group” convinced many users that it was the legitimate website.
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