Phishing Attackers Are Abusing WeTransfer to Evade Email Gateways

ProofPoint
Office365 Safe Links
Symantec

By Jake Longden

The Cofense Phishing Defense Center has observed a wave of phishing attacks that utilize the legitimate file hosting site WeTransfer to deliver malicious URLs to bypass email gateways. The attacks span major industries like banking, power, and media. Here’s how they work.

Email Body:

The email body is a genuine notification from WeTransfer which informs the victim that a file has been shared with them. The attackers utilise what appears to be compromised email accounts to send a genuine link to a WeTransfer hosted file. As these are legitimate links from WeTransfer, this allows them to travel straight through security checks at the gateway.

WeTransfer allows for the addition of a note to the email to clarify why the file was sent. Here, the threat actor will often write a note stating that the file is an invoice to be reviewed. This is a commonly observed phishing technique to pique the user’s interest.

Fig 1. Email body

Phishing Page:

When the user clicks on the “Get your files” button in the message body, the user is redirected to the WeTransfer download page where a HTM or HTML file is hosted and thus downloaded by the unsuspecting victim. When the user opens the .html file, he or she is redirected to the main phishing page.

Fig 2. WeTransfer Hosted file

In the final stage of the attack, victims are asked to enter their Office365 credentials to login. More often than not, we see a Microsoft Service being targeted, however we have observed other targeted brands.

Fig 3. Phishing Page

Gateway Evasion

As WeTransfer is a well-known and trusted file hosting system, used to share files too large to attach to an email, these links will typically bypass gateways as benign emails, unless settings are modified to restrict access to such file sharing sites. The PDC has observed this attack method to bypass multiple gateways. These include ProofPoint, Office365 Safe Links,  and Symantec.

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Other Ways Cofense Can Help

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