Quit Faking It—Train Your Users to Stop Real Phish
November 15, 2019 by Cofense in Internet Security AwarenessPhishingBy Tonia Dudley CofenseTM was the pioneer of phishing simulation as a training method to defend against phishing incidents. We’ve evolved our products and methodology as we understand that real phish are the real problem. What has also evolved over time is the depth of our scenario templates—when threat actors shift to use a new tactic to make their way past the secure email gateway (SEG), Cofense is able to quickly offer a scenario based on that tactic. When we say, “Real phish are the real problem” we mean organizations should set their phishing defense strategy from end to end....
Cofense Labs Has Identified a Sextortion Botnet in the Wild – and it’s Growing
November 14, 2019 by Cofense in Internet Security AwarenessPhishingBy Tonia Dudley, Cofense Security Solutions Every day, CofenseTM threat analysts and researchers monitor phishing and cyber security threats in the wild. In June of 2019, our researchers uncovered a sextortion botnet that contained a list of 200 million email addresses. Read the original announcement here. That database has since grown to over 330 million email addresses. We have also identified an increase in the number of unique web domains being targeted by the botnet. When we released our original findings, the database had close to 6 million unique domains. That total has grown to 7.4 million unique domains. To...
You’ve Been Served: UK Scammers Deliver ‘Predator the Thief’ Malware Via Subpoena
November 6, 2019 by Cofense in Cyber Incident ResponseMalware AnalysisBy Aaron Riley Not even the halls of justice are immune from scammers. A new phishing campaign spoofing the UK Ministry of Justice has successfully targeted users with a subpoena-themed email delivering Predator the Thief, a publicly available information-stealing malware. Cofense IntelligenceTM has observed employees in insurance and retail companies receiving these emails. The phishing email states that the recipient has been subpoenaed and is asked to click on a link to see more details about the case. The enclosed link uses trusted sources—namely Google Docs and Microsoft OneDrive—for the infection chain. The initial Google Docs link contains a redirect...
New Credential Phish Targets Employees with Salary Increase Scam
October 31, 2019 by Cofense in Cyber Incident ResponsePhishingBy Milo Salvia, Cofense Phishing Defense CenterTM The Cofense Phishing Defense Center (PDC) has observed a new phishing campaign that aims to harvest Office365 (O365) credentials by preying on employees who are expecting salary increases. The threat actors use a basic spoofing technique to trick employees into thinking that their company’s HR department has shared a salary increase spread sheet. Here’s how it works: Email Body Figure 1: Email Body The threat actor attempts to make the email appear to come from the target company by manipulating the “from” field in the headers. In particular, the threat actor changes the...
Are URL Scanning Services Accurate for Phishing Analysis?
October 28, 2019 by Cofense in Cyber Incident ResponsePhishingBy Chris Hall, Professional Services There are plenty of websites offering URL scanning for malicious links. Their tools are a quick and easy way to analyze a URL without visiting the site in a sandboxed environment. Widely used, these tools are accurate to a point. But in today’s phishing landscape, where attacks are increasingly sophisticated, such tools are becoming less and less reliable. We in the Cofense Phishing Defense CenterTM (PDC) believe they are ineffective against more advanced phishing websites. Phishing Sites Are Using Redirect Methods to Avoid Detection Let start with this example: An attacker can easily set up...
What’s Up With Malware? Find Out In Our Q3 Report
October 23, 2019 by Cofense in Threat IntelligenceBy Alan Rainer and Max Gannon On the malware front, the summer of 2019 was quiet and steady-state. But the end of Q3 saw the infamous Emotet resurface, presaging a malware uptick in Q4. Read all about it in the Cofense Q3 2019 Malware Trends Report. Maintaining a relative lull when Emotet suspended activity, threat actors in Q3 stuck to tried-and-true practices of intrusion. Phishing emails containing keyloggers (namely ‘Agent Tesla’) slightly rose in popularity, while information stealers like Loki Bot fell. Threat actors continue to seek the easiest, most efficient way of infiltrating users. Agent Tesla, for example, offers...
New Credential Phish Masks the Scam Page URL to Thwart Vigilant Users
October 22, 2019 by Cofense in Cyber Incident ResponsePhishingBy Milo Salvia, CofenseTM Phishing Defense CenterTM This blog has been updated since its first appearance on October 17, 2019 to include information related to the threat origin and bypassed email gateways. The Cofense Phishing Defense Center (PDC) has observed a phishing campaign that aims to harvest credentials from Stripe, the online payment facilitator handling billions of dollars annually, making it an attractive target for threat actors seeking to use compromised accounts to gain access to payment card information and defraud consumers. The phish prevents email recipients from seeing the destination of an embedded link when they try to hover...
Agent Tesla Keylogger Is Now a Top Phishing Threat
October 18, 2019 by Cofense in Malware AnalysisThreat IntelligenceBy Aaron Riley, Cofense IntelligenceTM The Agent Tesla keylogger is an increasingly widespread piece of malware in the phishing threat landscape, targeting multiple industries and using multiple stages within its infection chain. Currently, threat actors prefer archived files or weaponized Microsoft Office productivity documents to deliver this malicious software to the endpoint. Agent Tesla is sold as a commercial subscription license and offers a 24/7 support team. With an easy to use and abundant feature set—like a document exploit builder embedded into the malware management web panel—this keylogger lends itself to all levels of threat actors. A typical theme for...
This Credential Phish Masks the Scam Page URL to Thwart Vigilant Users
October 17, 2019 by Cofense in Cyber Incident ResponsePhishingBy Milo Salvia, Cofense Phishing Defense CenterTM The Cofense Phishing Defense Center (PDC) has observed a phishing campaign that aims to harvest credentials from Stripe, the online payment facilitator handling billions of dollars annually, making it an attractive target for threat actors seeking to use compromised accounts to gain access to payment card information and defraud consumers. The phish prevents email recipients from seeing the destination of an embedded link when they try to hover over the URL. Instead, what they see is a bogus account message. Here’s how the campaign works. Email Body The email pretends to be a notification...
New Phishing Sextortion Campaign Using Alternative Crypto Currencies to Evade Detection
October 8, 2019 by Cofense in Cyber Incident ResponsePhishingBy Hunter Johnson, Cofense Professional Services Cofense has observed threat actors employing a modified version of a sextortion scam using alternative crypto currencies to bitcoin. Typical sextortion scams claim to have installed malware on recipients’ systems and recorded their browsing history of adult websites and webcam footage. Ransom is demanded in bitcoin, upon threat of releasing damaging information to family, friends, and co-workers. Because threat actors often get recipients’ emails from password breach lists, they sometimes include passwords to lend authenticity. Early sextortion scams started with a plain text extortion email threating the recipient and asking for payment. As enterprises began...