Phishing increasingly sophisticated

Phishing is an online threat that’s been around for more than 20 years. I initially heard of it in relation to spammers taking over an AOL account to send out spam. These days phis is more dangerous and more sophisticated. Phishing is not just used to send spam. It’s used to take over elections; it’s used to steal millions of dollars. Experts estimate that globally phishing costs companies over 9 billion dollars a year.
Even in the last two weeks we’ve seen 2 major phishing incidents. One targeted Google Docs, one targeted Docusign. Reading the news reports these are different than many of the more common phishing attacks and, to me, represent an evolution in standard phishing techniques.

The Google attack in early May was an evolution in getting access to a Google account. Instead of directing users to a fake Gmail login page, the phish asked users to allow “Google Docs” (actually an app controlled by the phisher) to access to their Google account.
I’m sure all of you have used an app or website that lets you login with Facebook or Gmail or Twitter. This is all done with a protocol called OAuth. OAuth is also how you give access to mailbox management tools like I discussed a few weeks ago.  Basically, OAuth lets users grant access and permission to a site or application using a second site without revealing their username and password. (It’s more complicated than I want to discuss, but if you’re looking for some information check out some of the sites I’ve found: wikipedia, Varonis blog, Digital Ocean knowledge base, or just search google for oauth.)
The switch from asking for a password to asking for access is, to my mind, a significant change. Now we have to be aware of what we’re authorizing and make sure that app isn’t malicious.
The Docusign phish is another evolution.  As I was looking at the phish I received yesterday I realized that it was sent to a tagged address. A tagged address only Docusign had. None of my other, heavily phished, addresses received the phish. None of Steve’s addresses received the phish. This wasn’t a widespread spray and pray phishing attack. The phishers targeted Docusign users. Yesterday afternoon, Docusign confirmed that someone stole user addresses.
This is a switch from just randomly looking for victims to targeting users of a specific service.
Phishing attacks look for the weakest links to gain access to computers, information, and money. The weakest links are always humans. Phishers have adapted to security measures for the last 20 years. There is zero reason that they won’t continue to adapt.
 
 
 

Related Posts

Aetna, phishing and security

We’ve just gotten home from M3AAWG and I’m catching up with a lot of the administrative stuff that’s gotten ignored while we were soaking up the tons of information from some of the smartest Internet security folks around. One of the tasks I’m working on is checking on our recent bills from our health insurance provider. Their website seems to be down, so I called them up and asked them if it was down or if something was broken on my end.
They did confirm there was a problem with the site “earlier today” but then started asking me for my account information. They’ve promised to email me a new password because of reasons.
One of the things about M3AAWG is that concentrated discussions about spam and online criminals and security can make everything feel so fragile and security so inadequate to protect us against criminals. I start thinking that everything is compromised. It doesn’t help that websites fail just at the time when I start trying to figure out if my personal information leaked out.
In the course of trying to figure out if there is something wrong at Aetna and if my personal information is safe, I find an article about how poor security is for health companies. “Health companies flunked an email security survey—except Aetna.” Apparently, out of all the health companies out there, Aetna are the only ones fully implementing DMARC on all their mail streams.
The problem is that for the mail I received from Aetna, the visible From: address is AetnaeBilling@aetnagroupbilling.com. This is one of the major vulnerabilities of DMARC. How can I, as a recipient, tell that this is officially mail from Aetna? Any phisher could register “aetnabilling.com” or “aetnagoupbilling.com” or “aetnaebilling.com” and publish DMARC records and use those records to phish customers. Even worse, aetnagroupbilling.com isn’t a SSL registered website.
This is exactly the type of setup a phisher would use to gain access to people’s health insurance accounts. And Aetna offers the ability to draft payments directly from a business checking account, so breaking into the billing account also offers some level of access to the business money.
Do I think this is a phish? No.
Do I think the average person would be able to tell that? No.
There’s got to be a better way to secure folks online.

Read More

Compromises and phishing and email

Earlier this month, Sendgrid reported that a customer account was compromised and used for phishing. At the time Sendgrid thought that it was only a single compromise. However, they did undertake a full investigation to make sure that their systems were secure.
Today they released more information about the compromise. It wasn’t simply a customer account, a Sendgrid employee’s credentials were hacked. These credentials allowed the criminals to access customer data, and mailing lists. Sendgrid has a blog post listing things customers should do and describing the changes they’re making to their systems.
Last month it was Mandrill. Today it’s Sendgrid. It could be anyone tomorrow.
Security is hard, there’s no question about it. Users have to have access. Data has to be transferred. Every user, every API, every open port is a way for a bad actor to attempt access.
While it wasn’t said directly in the Sendgrid post, it’s highly likely that the employee compromise was through email. Most compromises go back to a phish or virus email that lets the attacker access the recipient’s computer. Users must be ever vigilant.
We, the email industry, haven’t made it easy for users to be vigilant. Just this weekend my best friend contacted me asking if the email she received from her bank was a phishing email. She’s smart and she’s vigilant, and she still called the number in the email and started the process without verifying that it was really from the bank. She hung up in the transaction and then contacted me to verify the email.
She sent me headers, and there was a valid DMARC record. But, before I could tell her it wasn’t a phishing email, I had to go check the whois record for the domain in question to make sure it was the bank. It could have been a DMARC authenticated email, but not from the bank. The whois records did check out, and the mail got the all clear.
There’s no way normal people can do all this checking on every email. I can’t do it, I rely on my tagged addresses to verify the mail is legitimate. If the mail comes into an address I didn’t give the sender, then it’s not legitimate – no matter what DMARC or any other type of authentication tells me. But most people don’t have access to tagged or disposable addresses.
I don’t know what the answers are. We really can’t expect people to always be vigilant and not fall for phishing. We’re just not all present and vigilant every minute of every day.
For all of you who are going to tell me that every domain should just publish a p=reject statement I’ll point out DMARC doesn’t solve the phishing problem. As many of us predicted, phishers just move to cousin and look alike domains. DMARC may protect citi.com, but citimarketingemail.com or citi.phisher.com isn’t.
We’ve got to do better, though. We’ve got to protect our own data and our customer’s data better. Email is the gateway and that means that ESPs, with their good reputations and authentication, are prime targets for criminals.

Read More

Are you (accidentally) supporting phishing

One of the themes in some of my recent talks has been how some marketers teach their customers to become victims of phishing. Typically I’m talking about how companies register domains “just for email” and then use those for bulk messages. If customers get used to mail from company.ESP.com and companyemail.com they’re going to believe that company-email.com is also you.
There are other ways to train your customers to be phishing victims, too. Zeltzer security walks us through a couple emails that look so much like phishing that it fooled company representatives. Go take a read, they give a number of examples of both good and bad emails.
biohazardmail
I was a little frustrated that the examples don’t include headers so we could look at the authentication. But the reality is only a teeny, tiny fraction of folks even know how to check headers. They’re not very useful for the average user.
Security is something we should never forget. As more and more online accounts are tied to our email addresses those of us who market to email addresses need to think about what we’re teaching our recipients about our company. DMARC and other authentication technologies can help secure email, but marketers also need to pay attention to how they are communicating with recipients.

Read More