Category: Internet Security

It’s usual for phishers to use natural catastrophes as a lure to get ‘donations’ to line their pouches instead of helping the sufferers and the California wildfires are no exception. A lot of people have lost their lives in the fires and the death toll is likely to increase further as hundreds of people are still unaccounted for.

Entire towns such as Paradise have been completely devastated by the wildfires and hundreds of people have lost their homes. Numerous are suffering, have nowhere to reside, and have lost everything. As expected many people desire to donate money to assist the sufferers rebuild their lives. The attackers are using the sympathy of others to deceive companies.

A California wildfire phishing cheat was recently noticed by Agari that tries to capitalize on the tragedy. Nevertheless, contrary to several similar phishing campaigns that depend on huge volumes of electronic mails, this campaign is much more targeted.

The scammer is carrying out a business electronic mail compromise attack using the electronic mail account – or a deceived account – of the CEO of a firm. The first phase of the scam involves a rapid electronic mail to a worker questioning if they are available to assist. When a response is received, a second electronic mail is sent asking the worker to make a purchase of 4 Google Play gift cards, each of $500.

The CEO asks if there is a local store where the cards can be bought and asks the worker to make the purchase ASAP and to scratch off the reverse side, get the codes, and email them back. The electronic mail claims the CEO requires the cards to send to customers who have been caught up in the wildfires to provide help.

While the selected method of sending help is doubtful, to say the least, and the electronic mails have grammatical and spelling mistakes, the use of the CEO’s electronic mail account may persuade workers to go ahead as ordered. These cheats work because workers do not want to ask their CEO and desire to reply swiftly. Even though a request may be strange, the reasoning behind the request seems perfectly genuine.

Although this might seem like an obvious fraud, at least worthy of a call or text to the CEO to confirm its validity, some workers will no doubt not question the request. Each one that does as trained will cost the company $2,000.

This kind of cheat is common. They are often associated with wire transfer requests. In the rush to reply to the CEO’s request, a transfer is made, which might be for tens of thousands of dollars. The worker replies to the message through electronic mail saying the transfer has been made, the scammer erases the electronic mail, and the fake transfer is often not detected until after the scammer has used money mules to withdraw the money from the account.

Access to the CEO’s electronic mail account can be obtained in several ways, even though a spear phishing attack is common. Spam filtering solutions can assist to decrease the possibility for the first attack to take place and two-factor verification controls can avoid account access if identifications are stolen.

Staff training is vital to increase awareness of the danger of BEC attacks. Policies must also be applied that need all transfer requests sent through electronic mail, and any out-of-bounds requests, to be confirmed over the phone or through a text before a transfer is made.

The United States is home to the maximum proportion of malware command and control (C2) infrastructure – 35% of the international total, as per fresh research circulated by phishing defense and threat intelligence company Cofense.  27% of network Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) from phishing-borne malware are also either situated in or proxied through the United States. Cofense data indicate that Russia is in the second position with 11%, followed by the Netherlands and Germany with 5% each and Canada with 3%.

C2 infrastructure is utilized by hackers to communicate with malware-infected hosts and deliver orders, download new malware modules, and exfiltrate data. Cofense clarified that simply because the C2 infrastructure is hosted in the United States doesn’t necessarily imply that more attacks are being carried out on U.S inhabitants than in other nations. It is usual for attackers to host their C2 infrastructure outside their own country to make it tougher for the agencies to identify their actions. C2 infrastructure is also usually situated in nations that don’t have a repatriation contract with the host nation.

Threat actors are more concerned with locating somewhere to find their C2 infrastructure to minimize risk instead of locating it in a particular country. Cofense notices that “C2 infrastructure is extremely prejudiced toward compromised hosts, showing a high occurrence of host compromises inside the United States.” That obviously makes perfect sense, since there are more possible hosts to compromise in the United States than in other nations.

“Some companies will obstruct any links coming from nations known for the origination of malevolent activity that they don’t do business with,” clarified Darrel Rendell, the principal intelligence expert at Cofense. That would make hosting C2 infrastructure in the United States beneficial, as links between malware and those servers would be less likely to raise red flags.

In a latest blog post, Cofense provides instances of the distribution of C2 infrastructure using two usual banking Trojans: TrickBot and Geodo. Both banking Trojans are widely used in attacks on Western nations, and attacks have risen in frequency in 2018. The two Trojans are conspicuously different because they belong to different malware families and are used by different threat actors.

In both instances, the infrastructure is growing and the C2 sites are highly different, even though data demonstrate very different distributions of C2 infrastructure for each malware variation. TrickBot’s main site for its C2 infrastructure is Russia, followed by the U.S. Geodo on the other hand mainly uses the U.S, followed by the Germany, France and the United Kingdom, with next to nothing situated in Russia.

Cofense notices that although the differences between the two seem odd at first glance, their dissemination makes sense. Geodo utilizes genuine web servers as a reverse proxy, which then transmits traffic via actual servers to hosts on concealed C2 infrastructure. TrickBot, in contrast, utilizes for-purpose Virtual Private Servers (VPSs) to host its infrastructure. Its C2 might be mainly in the east, but it is mainly used to attack the west and much of its C2 infrastructure is in nations that lack a repatriation contract with the United States. That said, some infrastructure is in the U.S and European nations, which might be an attempt to make its infrastructure tougher to profile.

Cofense clarifies that the widespread and widely distributed C2 infrastructure will not only assist to make sure these two threats remain active for longer but also that using geolocation to distinguish genuine and malevolent traffic might not be particularly effective.