A new phishing-as-a-service offering on the dark web poses a threat to online accounts protected by multi-factor authentication, according to a blog posted Monday by an endpoint security company.
Called EvilProxy, the service allows threat actors to launch phishing campaigns, with the ability to largely bypass MFAs without the need to hack upstream services, the Resecurity researchers noted in the blog. .
The service uses methods supported by APT and cyber espionage groups to compromise accounts protected by MFA. According to the researchers, such attacks have been discovered against Google and Microsoft customers whose accounts have MFA enabled via SMS text messages or application tokens.
Phishing links produced by EvilProxy lead to cloned web pages that have been compromised by accounts associated with multiple services, including Apple iCloud, Facebook, GoDaddy, GitHub, Dropbox, Instagram, NPM, PyPI, RubyGems, Twitter, Yahoo, and Yandex. has been prepared to do.
Threat actors using EvilProxy to gain access to their repositories are targeting software developers and IT engineers with the ultimate goal of hacking “downstream” targets, the researchers wrote.
He explained that these tactics allow cybercriminals to capitalize on end users who believe they are downloading software packages from secure resources and do not expect them to be compromised.
faster, faster, better
“This incident poses a threat to software supply chains because it targets developers by giving the service’s cybercriminal customers the ability to launch campaigns against GitHub, PyPI and NPM,” said Avid Gershon, leader of the security research team at Checkmarks. Said, an application security company, in Tel Aviv, Israel.
“Just two weeks ago,” he told TechNewsWorld, “we saw the first phishing attack against PyPI contributors, and now we see the service take it a few steps further by making these attacks accessible to less tech operators and adding capability. To bypass the MFA.”
Checkmarx’s head of supply chain security Tzachi Zorenstein said the nature of supply chain attacks increases the reach and impact of cyber attacks.
“Abusing the open-source ecosystem represents an easy way for attackers to increase the effectiveness of their attacks,” he told TechNewsWorld. “We believe this is the beginning of a trend that will increase in the coming months.”
A phishing-as-a-service platform can also increase attacker effectiveness. “Since PhaS can operate at scale, it enables adversaries to be more efficient at stealing and defrauding identities,” said Resecurity CEO Jean Yu.
“Old-fashioned phishing campaigns require money and resources, which can be overwhelming for one person,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Fas is just faster, faster, better.”
“It’s something that’s very unique,” he said. “It’s very rare to produce a phishing service on this scale.”
well packed
Many illegal services, hacking and malicious intent are solution products, explained Alon Nachmani, field CISO at AppviewX, a certificate lifecycle management and network automation company in New York City.
“By using a PhaS solution malicious actors have less overhead and less to spring an attack,” he told TechNewsWorld.
“Quite honestly,” he continued, “I’m surprised it took so long to become a thing. There are so many marketplaces where you can buy ransomware software and link it to your wallet. Once deployed , you can collect the ransom. The only difference here is that it is completely hosted for the attacker.”
While phishing is often considered a low effort activity in the hacking world, it still requires some work, said Monia Deng, director of product marketing at Bolster, a provider of automated digital risk protection in Los Altos, Calif. You’ll need it to do things like stand up to a phishing site, create emails, automate managers, and nowadays, steal 2FA credentials on top of primary credentials, she explained.
“With Faas,” she continued, “everything is neatly packaged on a subscription basis for criminals who do not require any hacking or even social engineering experience. It Opens the ground for many more threat actors who want to exploit organizations for their own gain.”
bad actors, great software
Security researchers explained that payment for EvilProxy is conducted manually through an operator on Telegram. Once the subscription funds are received, they will be credited to the account in the customer portal hosted on TOR. The kit is available for $400 per month.
EvilProxy’s portal has many tutorials and interactive videos on using the service and configuration tips. “To be clear,” the researchers wrote, “the bad actors did a great job in terms of service usability, and configuration of new campaigns, traffic flow, and data collection.”
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“This attack just shows the maturity of the bad actor community,” said George Gerchow, CSO and senior vice president of IT at Sumo Logic, an analytics company focused on security, operations and business information in Redwood City, Calif.
“They are packing these kits nicely with detailed documentation and videos to make it easier,” he told TechNewsWorld.
The service uses a “reverse proxy” principle, the researchers noted. It works like this: Bad actors lead victims to a phishing page, use a reverse proxy to get all the legitimate content the user expects to see, and sniff their traffic through the proxy.
“This attack highlights how low the barrier of entry is for unsophisticated actors,” said Heather Iannucci, a CTI analyst at Tanium, creator of an endpoint management and security platform in Kirkland, Wash.
“With EvilProxy, a proxy server sits between the legitimate platform’s server and the phishing page, which steals the victim’s session cookie,” she told TechNewsWorld. “This can then be used by the threat actor to login to a legitimate site as a user without an MFA.”
“Defending against EvilProxy is a challenge because it combines cheating a victim and MFA bypass,” Yu said. “The real compromise is invisible to the victim. Everything sounds good, but it’s not.”
still in effect
Nachmany warned that users should be concerned about the effectiveness of MFAs that use text messaging or application tokens. “Fas is designed to use them, and this is a trend that will grow in our market,” he said.
“The use of certificates as an additional factor is what I expect to see an increase in use soon,” he said.
While users should be careful when using an MFA, it is still an effective mitigation against phishing, said Patrick Harr, CEO of SlashNext, a network security company in Pleasanton, Calif.
“It increases the difficulty of leveraging compromised credentials to disband an organization, but it is not foolproof,” he said. “If a link leads the user to a counterfeit replica of a legitimate site—which is nearly impossible to identify as not legitimate—the user may be the victim of an adversary-in-the-middle attack, such as this one by EvilProxy.” is used to .”