ESP attacks, again. Be wary.

There seems to be an uptick in phishing attacks that have an impact on ESPs recently.
Your CEO
The most critical one is targeted spear-phishing attacks that claim to be internal documents sent by senior staff within the company, e.g. from the company CEO.
It’s likely that the attached documents will compromise and backdoor your machine, and from their most of your internal network, using an infected document to load a remote administration tool (RAT) such as Netwire.
Be very, very wary of document attachments, especially in generic looking emails that you weren’t expecting, from senior people. Making sure your antivirus signatures are up to date is a great idea, but nothing will protect you as effectively as not opening the infected documents.
Your domain registrar
The other campaign I’m aware of is emails that claim to be abuse reports from registrars (e.g. opensrs, tucows, etc) aimed at domain registration contacts, claiming that a domain has been suspended and that the recipient should click on a link to “download a copy of complaints received”.
e.g.

Dear Steve Atkins,
The Domain Name ABUSEMONKEY.COM have been suspended for violation of the TUCOWS, INC. Abuse Policy.

or

Dear Sir/Madam,
The following domain names have been suspended for violation of the TUCOWS, INC. Abuse Policy:
Domain Name: KNOWYOURDELIVERY.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS, INC.
Registrant Name: Steve Atkins

Related Posts

Is it real or is it spam?

The wanted but unexpected email is one of the major challenges facing ISPs and filter developers. If there was never any need or desire for people to receive email from someone they don’t know, then mail clients could be locked down to only accept mail from addresses on a whitelist. It wouldn’t completely solve the spam problem, for a number of reasons, but it would lessen the problem, particularly for average email users.
But, we don’t live in a world where we know beforehand who will be sending us mail, so we can’t just whitelist correspondents and reject everything else. I think this is a good thing. Email can be used to meet new people, develop new relationships and introduce new opportunities.
While the “cold call” email isn’t much talked about I think it’s worth some discussion. What makes a good cold email? What makes a bad one?  We can use two recent emails I received as examples.
Example 1:

Read More

Target breach started from email

According to Brian Krebs the compromise of Target’s POS system probably originated with a phishing attack against one of Target’s vendors. This attack compromised credentials of the HVAC vendor and possibly allowed the hackers entrance into Target’s systems.
Interestingly, Brian mentions Ariba, a company I’ve been forced to deal by a large customer of ours. I’m not sure if there really is an attack vector where a vendor can get access through Ariba to the internal systems of the customers. However, my experience with Ariba has been frustrating and problematic, so I’ll be happy to believe their security is as broken as their email.
Email is a great way to interact with people and companies. It’s great for growing communities and businesses. But it is also a way for attackers to get access to your computer and the websites you interact with. Protect yourself, and your company, by running security software. And, please, don’t open attachments or click on links in emails and provide usernames and passwords.

Read More

Address leak leads to phishing

A number of people in the industry are reporting getting phishing emails to addresses they used at DocuSign.
There were initial reports of a DocuSign data breach back in December. Now it appears DocuSign is being used as a phishing target.

Read More