Displaying items by tag: Phishing

The news that a feature in Gmail that shows a verification check mark for a sender is being abused by attackers should come as a surprise to no one. After all attackers have coopted, code singing certificates, legitimate web sites, and more as part of their attack processes, why wouldn’t a simple blue check mark be difficult? The new feature was introduced last month and, on the surface, looks like a great idea. Show that the sender of an email is who they say they are.

The RomCom backdoor malware appears to have a new campaign running. The new campaign is using impersonation attacks for different software packages (some real, some not). The goal is to trick the unwary into downloading, and hopefully launching malicious payloads. This type of campaign leverages ad services like Google Ads as a “trusted” platform using ads for software that is either often sought after or currently very popular, like ChatGPT, PDF readers, Remote Management software, etc. They are also, at times, leveraged as links in targeted or blanket phishing and social engineering attacks to get the malware on the targeted systems.

This one will get filed in the “you knew it was going to happen” file. After the announcement of a few new top-level domains (TLDs) including .zip and .mov by Google the security world silently shook its head. The concept of using file extensions as TLDs is one that defies logic. As soon as I read about these new domains, I knew someone was going to create phishing or malware attacks with URLs that look like common file names. These attacks can leverage modern web design to make a target think they are using an application to run or open the file when they are really executing commands in the background to compromise their systems. Lo and behold! We now have file archiver in the browser as shown off by mr.d0x.

The popular socialization platform, Discord, is alerting users to a data breach that occurred due to the compromise of a support agent account. The breach appears to be limited in scope to the ticket queue that the third-party agent was responsible for. The ticket queue contained email addresses, attachments and all messages that might have been exchanged during ticket resolution with this agent.

TA542 the wonderful people that brought you Emotet appears to be in the middle of a development and testing cycle on new delivery methods. According to researchers at ProofPoint the creators or the Emotet Botnet are potentially looking to find a new delivery method in response to the, long overdue, default disabling of VBA based Macros by Microsoft in their office products. Although ProofPoint seems to think this is development testing, the activity could also be part of a more targeted campaign.

The FBI, on March 29th, released a Private Industry Notification with vague details on a potential Phishing campaign targeting election officials in at least nine US states. The information in the advisory gives very broad information without really saying much. There is no information in the notification on which states were targeted and the phishing campaign sounds a lot like ones that are sent out to millions of people every day.

Phishing, regular and spear, is a very common method of compromising accounts and gaining access to a network. In many incidents, the initial compromise can be traced back to a compromised account via some sort of phishing message. This happens despite the many hours and dollars spent towards educating users about the dangers of trusting messages sent to them.

We have another Web3 article today. This one covers a new NFT marketplace compromise though the use of phishing emails that tricked users into singing over their digital assets to an, as of yet, unknown attacker.

Most attacks, be they real or from a penetration test, begin with an attempt to compromise a single system, or user. The compromise of a device or user account gives the attacker a small foothold in an environment that they can use to pivot to other areas and begin their complete takeover of the targeted organization. Defenders use many techniques to try to prevent this including complex passwords, complex usernames and, of course multi-factor authentication (MFA). MFA, when done properly, reduces the risk of credential compromise from phishing and spearphshing significantly.

Researchers at Morphisec have detailed a new delivery type for AsyncRAT (Remote Access Trojan) used in part of a phishing campaign that has been running since at least September 2021. The phishing part of the campaign is routine, an email with an HTML attachment. The attachment looks like a receipt. When opened, the victim is directed to a webpage that asked them to save a file (an ISO file). On the surface it looks like it would be a regular file download that will go through common security channels. However, things turn out not to be what they expected (read that in Morgan Freeman’s voice).