Security experts at Symantec are warning about a new password recovery scam targeting Gmail users worldwide mainly for intelligence gathering.

Every day scammers propose new techniques to steal personal information and other sensitive data. Today we will speak of a new social engineering technique used in the wild by crooks that allow them to hack into an email account by simply knowing the victim’s phone number.

Security experts at Symantec are warning people about a new password recovery scam that tricks users into giving attackers the control over their webmail account. All an attacker needs to take over a webmail account is the victim’s email address and cell phone number.

“The cybercriminals carrying out these attacks do not seem to be focused on financial gain such as stealing credit card numbers. They appear to be looking to gather information about their targets and are not targeting users en masse, instead going for specific individuals. The way they operate is similar to the methods used by APT groups.” states Symantec.

Symantec published a video explanation of how this social technique works: