![Malware comes in many different varieties. Analyst Krasimir Konov is on this month’s Sucuri Sit-Down to help keep them all straight. From malicious iframes to SEO spam, join host Justin Channell as he racks Krasimir’s brain on all the different types of malware. Also, Krasimir discusses his recent blog post about a malicious cURL downloader, and Justin breaks down the latest website security news, including patched plugins you should update. Podcast Transcript Justin Channell: Hello, and welcome to the Sucuri Sit Down. I'm your host, Justin Channell, and this is a monthly podcast about website security, where we get in-depth with the malware removal experts here at Sucuri. Later in the show, I'll have our analyst Krasimir Konov to chat about some different types of malware, but first, let's take a look at other topics we've published on our blog and Sucuri labs notes this month. First up, we have some new information about credit card skimming with hackers using a hybrid method to steal payment information from eCommerce websites. Our analyst Dennis Sinegubko wrote about this for the Sucuri blog back at the beginning of June. Now, most credit card stealing malware is a client side JavaScript that grabs data and sends it to a third party server. But, that approach has a drawback for bad actors because it's still possible to track the requests and catch them as being suspicious. Now, to get around that, bad actors have started harvesting information server side by modifying core PHP files. In this case, the infection would be undetectable from the outside, but it's still going to be pretty easy to find because you're rarely modifying any of those core files, so any of those changes that are going to come up are going to be suspicious. To get around both of these drawbacks, we're seeing bad actors combine the two. So client side snippets of JavaScript are sending stolen credit card data to server side scripts that they've installed on the same server as the site. Now, this allows bad actors to cover their tracks a little bit because the traffic that's being redirected is going to the same server, and that's less likely to be flagged as suspicious. It's a bit more complicated to pull this off, but our team has been seeing this hybrid approach in the wild, so it's something to be on the lookout for. Now, another month has passed, and we found more cross site scripting attacks targeting WordPress plugins. Most notably, we discovered one that affects users of the YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter plugin. Now, this is a plugin that allows WooCommerce stores to be filtered by product type, and it's pretty popular. It's got about 100,000 users right now, so with it being vulnerable, it's very important that all of them update to the latest version, which is 3.11.1. Some of the other plugins we found cross site scripting vulnerabilities with included Elementor Page Builder, Careerfy, JobSearch, and Newspaper. If you're looking for a full list of vulnerabilities that have been patched this month, John Castro at the Sucuri Labs blog has you covered. Check out our show notes for the link. Also, this month I had a blog go up detailing what's called a jibberish hack. It's basically the same motivation as an SEO spam attack where bad actors use your site's good standing to redirect visitors to their own sites. But in this attack, you'll find a bunch of randomly named folders filled with a ton of HTML files with really nonsensical file names like cheap-cool-hairstyles-photos.html. It's just going to be a mishmash of keywords that clearly you didn't put there. Unfortunately, just deleting all those HTML files and folders is not going to be enough to get rid of that jibberish hack though. You're going to need to fully clean any hacked files and database tables, and then you're going to have to deal with all the damage caused to your site's standing. And just keep in mind, if you find anything about that process too daunting, we're always here to help. Now, for this month's Sit Down, we have Sucuri analyst Krasimir Konov. Earlier in June, he had written a lab's note about a malicious downloader script that used the curl function, and we chatted a bit about it, but more importantly, we went really in-depth on all the different varieties of malware that website owners need to be aware of. But, before I get started with Krasimir, I just wanted to remind you about the Sucuri Sync-Up, our sister podcast. It's a weekly website security news briefing that you can find anywhere you get your podcasts, as well as the video version on our social media feed, and now you can even get it on your Amazon Alexa smart speakers. Just search Amazon skills for Sucuri Sync-Up, add the flash briefing, and get new content delivered every Monday. Now, on with the show. Hi Krasimir, thanks for joining us on the show. I thought we could start off and maybe have you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do here at Sucuri? Krasimir Konov: Yeah, sure. Well, I joined Sucuri originally in 2014, but I've been in the IT business for about 10 years. Nine of those I did security. And currently at Sucuri I'm one of the malware analysts. I used to work in the front lines, used to clean websites and whatnot, and then I gradually moved up, and now I'm working in the malware research department. And my day to day job is basically analyzing malware, and then once I analyze it and figure out what it is, then I will create a signature for it. And we'll add those signatures to our tools, so we can automate some of the work we do. And I also write some Labs Notes blog posts. Usually, if I find something interesting in malware or some security topic, I'll write about it. Justin Channell: Yeah. And of those topics recently that you wrote about, one was about a malicious curl downloader, and how exactly did that work? Krasimir Konov: Right, yeah. That was an interesting one, but not very unique or anything like that. We see that a lot with curl being used as a downloader. It's a very common malware. So rather than including the actual malware in the file, the attackers would use curl to download the malicious code. In this case, they'll download it from Pastebin, but it could be anything. It could be another website or anything like that, and curl would just make a call to the website, request the code. The website will respond with the code, and then later on, there is some code to either save the output somewhere on the website, or you'll just run it through eval and execute the actual code right away. Justin Channell: Right. And you said that it's commonly found in malware, but let's kind of maybe talk a bit broader about malware in general. What is everything that is classified as malware? Krasimir Konov: Well, in general it will be anything that the owner of the website didn't authorize, anything that was added by a third party. There is a lot of different malware. It could be even something like a defacement that will also be considered malware because it was something the user did not authorize. Even though it might not be doing anything malicious on the website, it's not infecting users, the visit is still something they did not authorize. So defacement would also be considered malware. And even something like ransomware where the website is technically not really damaged, it's all encrypted, but it's not infecting anybody. It's not doing anything malicious, but it's still encrypting the entire website and asking the user or the customer, the owner of the website for a ransom they need to pay in order to get the website back online. Justin Channell: Okay. Let's maybe break it down to each individual type of malware. For example, what would be a way that maybe I-frames could be maliciously used by a hacker? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. An I-frame can be used maliciously when it loads content from another location. You can look at the I-frame as a window that just opens another website. So anything that website has on it, you're pretty much loading it through the I-frame. So if that website is infected and it's serving some kind of malware, by opening an I-frame, you're loading all those elements, everything that was on this website. And sometimes the I-frame can be as small as pixel or something hidden somewhere off the screen, so you wouldn't even know that it was opening it. Justin Channell: And yeah, I feel like we've also seen a lot of them where they're used almost to mimic popups as well. Krasimir Konov: Yeah. I mean the I-frame, it could just load from another website and the other website could do anything. It could be serving just malware and it would try to infect the user that doesn't even know that they're being connected to the other website. It could just have some other JavaScript that's just trying to open up pop ups on the original website through the I-frame. Yeah, it could be a lot of things. Justin Channell: Okay. And also, let's talk a little bit about conditional redirects and how those work. What allows a script to detect which devices are coming in and where they're coming from? Krasimir Konov: Right. Yeah. That's a common one we see a lot. Basically, a conditional redirect would be something, it's a redirect on the website. It's obviously malicious, but there's certain conditions that need to be met before the redirect is actually executed or the redirect happens. For example, let's say if it's on a phishing website or a phishing page that is hidden somewhere on the website. For example, if Google visits it, obviously the attacker doesn't want Google to see the actual phishing page and record it as a phishing page. So they'll look for, for example, the IP address. They would look for the user agent. And a lot of times they can tell that it's a bot. So they'll just return a 404 response, for example, that will be like, "Oh, page not found." So Google would be like, "Oh, it looks like this page doesn't exist." But then if a regular user goes to the same page, then those conditions will be met. The actual website or the script behind the phishing will check and see, and be like, "Oh, this one is running Firefox or Chrome," and be like, okay. And then they'll look at the IP and be like, "Oh, he's in whatever, he's in United States somewhere." And he's like, "Oh, okay. That's good." And then once all of these conditions are met, then the actual script will serve them the actual phishing page. And it'll be like, "Oh, you need to fill out this to recover your account or whatever, or type in your credentials to log in here." Justin Channell: And so this is the type of thing we're really, a website owner is going to run into this more commonly when people are complaining about they're getting served bad content or whatever, and they can't seem to replicate it. It's likely probably these kind of redirects. Is that right? Krasimir Konov: Right, right. It could be something as specific as, for example, a range of IP addresses that correspond to an ISP or maybe let's say a country. It could be like, "Oh, were targeting only customers in the US," so if you're connecting from another country and you go to the same website or the same page, it would just say 404. It will give you a page not found. But then if you actually have an IP address from the United States, you're connecting from the United States, then it will actually show you the phishing page. Justin Channell: Now another type of malware I feel like we see a lot here is SEO spam. We hear people talking about that. What are some of the top SEO spam keywords that you see coming through? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. We get that a lot. We see a lot of spam on websites. A lot of times attackers will use SEO spam to gain ranking for their own website. Or they'll just try to include some kind of SEO spam in links to another website that they're currently running or something. I mean, these things change all the time. So a website might be up for a week and then it'll disappear, and then they'll start another campaign. But yeah, we see that a lot. We see all kinds of keywords they use. Most common ones will be something like Viagra. We'll have like jerseys for sale. A lot of times, they'll use name brands like Nike, Rolex, Prada. We've seen even some essay writing services for some reason. I'm not sure why, but that's common. We see, for example, pharmaceuticals a lot that will use specific medicine names. They'll use all kinds of replicas, like a replica bag of this, replica this, replica that. We'd see prescription, also payday loans. And obviously there's some adult related sites and things like that keywords. Justin Channell: So pretty much anything that people are going to be searching and clicking on are probably going to be targets for SEO spam? Krasimir Konov: Right. I think a lot of it commonly is pharma related because a lot of people are looking to buy medicine online, and a lot of times will require a prescription. So a lot of people are like, "Oh, let me see if I can find this medicine that I can buy it online somewhere." They don't need a prescription. They don't want to pay to visit a doctor and whatnot, and they'll look for it. And yeah. Justin Channell: Now, whenever somebody's website does get hacked with a SEO spam attack, what kind of effect can it have on the website beyond just being defaced? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. You can have a lot of things can happen, negative things. For example, the website can be blacklisted because of the keywords. And that usually represents a big red warning when you go on the website, depending on who blacklisted it. But if it's Google, for example, you'll see a big warning and it'll tell you this website contains malware or there's something wrong with this website. So, pretty much all the traffic on the website will be gone. And then you can also lose a lot of your reputation if there is a SEO spam on the website. For example, if you were ranked in say number five for certain keywords that represent your product on Google search engines, and then suddenly you get hit with SEO spam, then all these search engines then go and visit the website. And all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, there's all these weird key words on here, all this SEO spam that's causing a lot of mixed signals." And the search engines are like, "Oh, where do we rank this website now? Do we rank them with this product that's originally what the website is about? Or do we take into consideration all these other keywords that are mixed up that are SEO spam?" So, all of a sudden your website might go from being ranked number five on the first page to being on the 10th page. And then you rank for all these other keywords that you didn't intend to. And then people search for something completely different. They're searching for jerseys or something, or now they're searching for Prada products, and then suddenly your website pops up in there. So you're not really getting any good traffic, not targeted traffic. But, yeah. Justin Channell: Okay. So in a lot of ways, the effects of SEO spam would kind of be the same for defacements or any kind of malware with the blacklisting, but it does bring that kind of unique part to it where then it can also then bring traffic that you weren't expecting from somebody searching for jerseys, for example. I had not really ever thought about that. Krasimir Konov: Right, right. Yeah. It will definitely bring some traffic. I've seen a lot of times where websites will be connected. Let's say, there was 1,000 websites that were all infected with SEO spam, and it will kind of link each other to try to bring each other up into the rankings. And so you would see a lot of strange traffic from some random websites that were, for example, that were previously infected, even if they might not be anymore. But yeah, they'll be sending traffic to you or there'll be usually search engines sending you traffic, but for the wrong keywords. People are looking for something else, so obviously they're not going to be interested in your website. They're not going to buy anything because they're not looking for that. Justin Channell: And now, so thinking of the way websites get infected, a very common way it seems to be is through phishing campaigns. What are some recommendations you have for the best ways to avoid becoming a phishing victim? Krasimir Konov: Yeah. There is some ways. I mean, it depends really on the type of attack. Obviously, a lot of people, when they think of phishing, they think, "Oh, it's just like a PayPal phishing page and it just looks like the original," but it could be more subtle. If it's just a regular page where you're just going and you get redirected to another website, obviously the first thing to look is if you have the security padlocks, make sure that traffic is encrypted. A lot of these websites don't really have any encryption nowadays. More are starting to get that with pre SSLs being issued and whatnot. But that's the first thing to look and see, make sure. Anywhere you're typing your sensitive information, you want to make sure you have the padlock to make sure everything is encrypted. Krasimir Konov: But also you want to look at the URL of the actual website you're visiting. A lot of times they'll try to hide it. So you might have to be careful and look closely. Something that might be an I will be an L or something like that. And a capital I and L might look kind of similar into your IRL, so you might miss something like that. Say, if you're looking for PayPal and it might replace the L with an I, and if you don't look closely, it might look exactly the same. And you're like, "Oh, okay, it's paypal.com," but not really. So yeah. Just pay attention to the URL, make sure it is the actual website. There's no paypal.com dot something, dot something else, dot com. Yeah. You want it to just say paypal.com, and then it'll have forward slash and something else. But yeah, it gets more complicated when you have, for example, a phishing page that's injected into a regular page. For example, you have a checkout page on a website that you're buying things from and you go through the checkout page and you're looking at where you type in your credit card information and whatnot. And you might have a phishing page that actually looks exactly like a little box that gives you where you put in your credit card number, or your name, your address, and all that. So that will be more subtle. For example, that could be also an I-frame that's just coming from another page. And it will look exactly like it's part of the website. You're on the legitimate website, but only that portion of the website is actually the phishing page. And you look at it and you're like, "Oh, okay. It looks fine. I'm just putting my credentials." So that one could be a lot harder to figure it out. Usually, if it's something like that, I look for something that looks kind of out of place. Maybe they didn't get the right font. It might not be the same as the original website or there might be something out of place, some fields that are missing or some fields that are squished into the left or the right. It looks kind of awkward. It's like, why would this be like this? The whole website looks professional. There's a pink background or something, for example, and then suddenly there's this white box in the middle. It's like, ah, it looks kind of weird, out of place. Justin Channell: So pretty much if anything looks slightly out of place, you really should double check everything at that point. Krasimir Konov: Right. Right. Yeah. Obviously there's more ways that you can check, but I wouldn't get into more technical, like inspecting elements and looking at stuff, but yeah. Justin Channell: And now another type of malware that's kind of, and it kind of plays in with whatever the other infection is, is backdoors. Can you give us some examples of what backdoors can be? It's mainly just when a hacker can get back into the site to reinfect it, but I know there are a ton of different methods. And what are some of the more common ones and then maybe some that really interesting that you've seen? Krasimir Konov: Yeah, there is a lot. They'll probably be one of the first things the hacker would do is if they compromise a website, obviously they'll try to spread backdoors and just inject code everywhere so they can get back in, even if the owner of the website or webmaster cleans it. They want to try and hide some malicious code somewhere so they can always get back in. There's many variations. A backdoor could be something as simple as a single line of code to just [inaudible 00:20:19] argument, some kind of string or something via get or post. Krasimir Konov: And then it runs into an eval, so it evaluates the code and executes it. And some backdoors are very complex and they can be included in, let's say you have a WordPress site and you have a specific login page where all the login credentials are being processed and everything else. They could even inject code into that to basically bypass the whole login mechanism so that they can just bypass everything. They don't even have to know any user. They don't have to know the password, nothing. They'll just include some lines in there, and every time they'll be just able to log in. Yeah. It gets pretty crazy. Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of malware. There is always a malware, for example, that just targets credit cards and will just target the eCommerce websites. And they'll just try to steal the login credentials, I mean, the credit cards. They'll try to get your address, your credit card information, any kind of CVV code or whatever you typed into the billing address, everything. And then there's also malware like the backdoors that are just trying to keep the attacker in control and trying to get them back into the website. There's just so many variations of what a malicious user might want to do on a website. Some can be something as simple as just reinfecting the website. They don't want to keep control. They just want to keep reinfecting it with some kind of malware. So even if you clean it, it would just get reinfected. Some of them in the database, otherwise might be in the files. We've seen some added into a [inaudible 00:22:14] job that just keeps running on the server. There could be malware that is just a giant to, for example, attack out of websites. Like for example, a distributed denial service where they put the same malware on thousands of websites. And then they try to send traffic to one website to try to bring it down. Yeah. People try to do all kinds of stuff with websites. We've seen even some cryptocurrency mining malware that you go onto a website and suddenly your PC starts running like crazy. And you're like, what the hell is going on? Your fans turn on and the PC is 100% CPU. And it turns out that the website has some malware that's just by mining Bitcoins with your CPU and it's using all of it. Justin Channell: Wow. Okay. So one question now, the last question I have is of all the malware that you've seen, what do you think is the coolest piece of malware that you've ever seen? Krasimir Konov: I think the coolest would be the ones that are so subtle that you don't even know that it's there. For example, we've seen some that were pretty innovative. It will be just a one liner code that's just one line. And for example, it will be let's say 40-50 characters, something like that. And that's all it is. And they'll hide it somewhere in between the legitimate code. And if you don't know what you're looking for, you would never see it. It doesn't look suspicious. There is no links to some other website. There's no some kind of encrypted code or anything like that. It's just a simple one line. And then if you're just scrolling through the file looking for something, you would never see it. It just looks like all the other code. And then if you look closely, you're like, "Oh, there's this..." Look closely, and you're like, "Oh wow, this is not supposed to be there." And then you keep looking at it and you're like, "This looks really weird." And then you see that it's actually doing some malicious things and trying to evaluate some code or taking output from the outside, I mean, some input from outside, you can call it and give it code to run. Justin Channell: Well, Krasimir, thanks for coming on and talking to us for today. Krasimir Konov: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so happy. I'm glad I was able to do this podcast and I can't wait to do another one. Justin Channell: Yeah, we'll have you on again. Thanks. Krasimir Konov: Thank you. Justin Channell: Thanks again to Krasimir for joining us here on the Sit Down. We'll be back with another episode next month. So be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or any podcasting platform. Also, be sure to follow us on social media at Sucuri Security and check us out at sucuri.net. That's S-U-C-U-R-I.net. I'm Justin Channell, And this has been the Sucuri Sit Down. Stay safe out there.](https://blog.sucuri.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/20-sucuri-podcast-blog-post_blog_image.jpg)
Phishing attacks are one of the most popular methods for bad actors to gain access to a website environment. On this month’s podcast, analyst Luke Leal is with us to talk about these attacks. Topics covered include the motivation bad actors have for these attacks, who is a likely target, and preventative measures.
Plus, host Justin Channell breaks down more website security news from July – including new backdoors, a malicious WordPress plugin, and malware hiding in images and GitHub repositories.
For further reading about any topics discussed, check out these blogs we reference in the episode:
- Pirated WordPress Plugins Bundled with Backdoors
- Spox Phishing Kit Harvests Chase Bank Credentials
- Fake WordPress Plugin SiteSpeed Serves Malicious Ads & Backdoors
- Malicious Magento User Creator
- Skimmers in Images & GitHub Repos
Podcast Transcript
Justin Channell:
Hello and welcome to the Sucuri Sit-Down. I’m your host Justin Channell and this is a monthly podcast about website security, where we get in-depth with the malware removal experts here at Sucuri. Now later in the show, I’ll have our analyst Luke Leal on the mic to talk about phishing attacks. But first, we’re going to take a look at some of the updates that our research team have published on the Sucuri blog this month.
First up, is actually a blog that Luke wrote about backdoors that were found in pirated WordPress plugins and themes earlier this month. It’s a relatively common practice for this to happen. In fact, last October, when we were at WordCamp US, we asked WordPress users their top security tips and avoiding pirated software came up quite often. However, what Luke highlighted in his post is that some of the sites that host these nulled or pirated plugins make it clear that you’re installing a backdoor. He had an example from a site that had a clause right in the terms of service that their software would allow for backdoor access. But what they don’t tell you is that even deleting those plugins doesn’t take away that backdoor.
To get a more technical look at how all this works check out Luke’s blog in the show notes. And for Magento users, you’ll want to check out the notes for a blog from last month’s guest, Krasimir Konov. He covered a malicious script named Inchoo, which allows a new admin user to be created in a Magento site. And much like the backdoors we discussed in WordPress, simply deleting the files is not enough. In fact, the script tries to hide the suspicious files after creating a new user. Krasimir also covered something for WordPress users. There’s a fake plugin called Sitespeed you need to be looking out for. When this malware is installed on a WordPress site, it allows for a lot of functionality for bad actors, including user creation, ad injections, and backdoors.
So be sure to regularly audit your plugins to make sure nothing like this sneaks onto your site. One of the more surprising blogs we had this month came from Denis Sinegubko, who covered a credit card skimmer that was hidden inside of a PNG file. Now this is a common obfuscation technique for bad actors. What happens here, essentially, is that the image file is being used as a text file instead of an image file. So a script can be added after all of the binary code that makes up the image. And when you open it in an image viewer, it’s just going to see an image. It’s not going to see that text. But when it’s opened as a text file, it can actually load that little script that’s in there.
In this case, the script was actually referencing the exact lines within the PNG file. And this first PNG file was made to look like a Google tag manager component. So you’d probably not notice it. And then it would reference another PNG file that was hosted in a public GitHub repository that was allegedly a beta version of Magento 2.4. And with so many legitimate services involved in this attack, it’s clear, it’s becoming more difficult to spot this kind of malware. Website owners should use integrity control checks and a website monitoring service to help detect any suspicious changes.
And Chase Bank customers were targeted with a sophisticated phishing kit this past month. Luke Leal wrote about that on our blog. And he’s been focusing quite a lot on these phishing attacks in his work here at Sucuri. Now, with so many phishing attacks happening these days, I wanted to sit down with Luke to give a better understanding of the effects of these attacks.
But before I get started with Luke, I just wanted to remind you about our sister podcast, Sucuri Sync-Up. It is a weekly website security news briefing that you can find anywhere you get your podcasts, or as an Alexa flash briefing or in video form on our social media accounts. Get new website security content delivered every Monday.
Now, on with the show. All right. So I’m here with Luke Leal. Luke, thanks for joining us here on the show. Can you just go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself?
Luke Leal:
Yes, sir. As you said, my name’s Luke. And I’ve worked for Sucuri since late 2015. And I work on the research team. So I analyze a lot of the malware samples and phishing samples that we get and just try and form a sort of threat model based off of those, that way we can help defend websites we protect a little bit better and be able to detect better new threats that are emerging.
Justin Channell:
Okay. Now, what kind of motivates hackers to create these campaigns? It seems you would know that from creating those threat models.
Luke Leal:
Primarily, financially based. The actual goal dangles financial but the process takes them through account takeovers. And that’s primarily what the phishing that we see deals with. So it’ll be targeting a lot of the brands, all of the most popular brands, specifically like software as a service and financial brands. So one of the most popular ones is, Netflix is one of them. And then Spotify is another, just commonly stolen through phishing account. And then it’s just offered for resell online.
Justin Channell:
Okay. So really, in terms of who’s most likely to be targeted, really it’s just any anybody would be. And if you’re buying a product, you’re most likely a target of a phishing campaign, right?
Luke Leal:
Yeah. Yeah. If you have an account with any of the largest services and even if it’s not one of the largest services, there’s also targeted attacks to smaller services. So yeah. As long as you’re online, you can pretty much be a target.
Justin Channell:
Okay. And with that in mind, so what are some common signs of a phishing attack that people can see whenever they’re online and keeping in mind security?
Luke Leal:
Oh, the first thing you want to look at, for the average user, you just need to be aware of the signs. And for example, if you received an email and there was a link that you were maybe suspicious about, you would just want to go ahead and verify the link by determining the actual URL it’s using. So you could right click the hyperlink in the email and select copy URL, copy URL location, and then you can just paste that into a notepad or something. And that’ll give you the actual URL that’s going to load in your browser. And that’ll help you determine if it’s good or bad, if it’s sending you to the right login page or the right website, or if it’s sending you to just some random page that doesn’t really have any affiliation with the brand that you think you’re trying to access.
Justin Channell:
Often, they’re going to be using URLs… Will they look like they’re from that? I know I can remember there was one where there was a PayPal address going around, but it was like instead of the “L” it was an “I” that then they capitalized and would the copy and paste kind of make those things a little bit more apparent too?
Luke Leal:
Yeah. Well, with those type of attacks where they use phishing domains, they’ll specifically sign up and register lookalike domains that use various techniques of changing out characters, they’ll use transposition. Or I think they also use homoglyphs, which they’ll use that. And when registering the actual domain and so it’ll use different text encoding for the characters and that can make it pretty difficult to tell. I know what I’ll do is, usually when I’ll paste it into a notepad to look at the URL, I’ll greatly increase the font size. I’ll just use control and mouse wheel or mouse scroll up or control plus the plus sign and it’ll enlarge the font. And that way it’s easier to read because yeah, it can sometimes be difficult to tell otherwise. Yeah, that’s a common technique that’s used to register phishing domains.
Justin Channell:
So yeah, sometimes they are found on the domains and stuff, but where are the attacks most commonly found?
Luke Leal:
On the website structure itself. Usually they’re going to be placing it just to avoid any signs that it will be apparent to the website owner. They’re going to place it into sub-directories. So they’ll pick a random sub-directory and maybe a wp-content/uploads for WordPress or inside the wp-includes directory. Somewhere that the website owner or users aren’t going to be looking regularly. And so there’s really no way for them to detect it on their own unless they happen to come across it in FTP or some other file manager. And that’s pretty unlikely unless they have a reason to be looking for it.
Luke Leal:
But yeah, otherwise usually the first signs, the first way they learn about it, oftentimes it’s through blacklisting. They’ll receive a blacklisting and it’ll just come out of sort of like left field. And they won’t know what to do. They didn’t even know they had a security issue and yet now they’re blacklisted and they have to go through the whole removal process that that entails.
Justin Channell:
Okay. And now, would you say that’s probably the worst case scenario of what that can lead to within an organization that has been hacked, would probably be that?
Luke Leal:
Well, with an organization, when you use worst-case scenario, it can really… To be honest, it can lead to total [inaudible 00:09:56] organization or business going out of business, being shut down, just due to the cost that it takes for remediation and all the costs involved regarding surviving a security incident like that. Yeah.
Luke Leal:
So for example, there’s a school district in Texas, and they suffered a business email compromise, which is a sort of phishing technique. Well, it is a phishing technique, it’s just a subset of it. And they were out for $2 million. So, that caused them to have to enact a different budget because now they were going to be over budget by a lot because they’re missing $2 million. And so yeah, it had ramifications and that’s for a public, sort of state-run organization. With a private one, yeah there’s been incidents where, specifically with smaller businesses, or yeah, it’s just unsurvivable.
It sounds kind of drastic and hardcore but that is the worst-case scenario. And for most organizations, it’s just going to be like a stolen email account. That’s not going to be that big of a risk, unless, like I said, business email compromise is probably one of the biggest risks that they’ll encounter.
Justin Channell:
Wow. Now, in the case that somebody has been targeted, to kind of avoid that worst-case scenario, what should they do? Let’s say they’ve already given up their personal information.
Luke Leal:
Yeah. And in those cases for a person, my recommendation really depends on exactly what information they gave up. So, if it was like a phishing page and it was for a Netflix account, it depends actually what’s on the phishing page. Because, just because it’s a Netflix account phishing page, they can still ask a lot of personal detailed questions, like your social security number, date of birth. So if you’re giving up the information like DOB, SSN, any of that, then yeah, I would go ahead and recommend that you just fully freeze your credit if possible. Otherwise, purchase some type of credit monitoring. That way you can stay on top of any new credit attempts that are created for your account. But otherwise, I would just recommend resetting the login and resetting your email account password that received the phishing email.
Justin Channell:
Yeah. Now, in terms of a business, should they kind of do about the same thing? Is that where they should start and then escalate further as they see kind of what’s come about? Or is there a different strategy that businesses should take, or any organization for that matter?
Luke Leal:
Yeah, it depends on the size of the organization and the kind of the security policy they have. I know for larger organizations, if a successful phishing page is delivered to an employee and they get phished, they go to it and they give up their login information. They’ll sort of quarantine that login and they’ll separate it to… they’ll remove its normal access, that way it [inaudible 00:13:41] say the attacker was able to fully login to it and use it. It would have limited access. So, that way the employee has some remains active in the organization. They have access to some of the tools but they don’t have as much access as before. And during that time, the security team would perform an investigation and take any other measures that need to be taken. They would go ahead and do that as needed. In terms of a set standard that’s followed, I guess that the only set standard would be to secure the account that is phished. Other than that, it’s an on basis type of deal.
Justin Channell:
How could users protect themselves from phishing campaigns, other than just detecting changes? Because that, as you’ve mentioned, it can be very difficult, some things could slip through the cracks. Is there anything else that they can use as to kind of catch these attacks in the while before they end up accidentally giving them their information?
Luke Leal:
Yeah. You can use a lot of antivirus programs, Malwarebytes. A lot of consumer grade security products, they’ll offer phishing detection. And so if you go to a phishing URL or if you try to go to a phishing URL or domain, it’ll just block it and it’ll come up with a warning notification and say, “Hey, this URL was blocked due to known phishing threats,” something like that. And so for most consumers, that’s the best way and the easiest way to go about getting some type of automated defense against phishing threats. But the only problem is they’re not always perfect. So you’ll want to also just stay vigilant in terms of checking the URL and not depending on that software entirely.
Justin Channell:
Okay. And now for businesses, how can they kind of test to see which employees are the ones that are falling for the phishing scams? Are there any tools or services for that?
Luke Leal:
Yeah. Yeah. There exist a few different companies. I’m not even sure how many, it’s definitely a growing industry in terms of a subset of the information security industry, in terms of training. And yeah, since phishing is such a large threat to organizations, specifically phishing training is something that’s really emerged in the last few years. And on top of the training, the training is something that’s great for all organizations. But yeah, in addition to the training, they also offer certain services that are more tailored to organizations that offer enterprise level email filtering and email scanning. And yeah, you can get that through… Some of the bigger companies are Proofpoint, PhishLabs, Inky, I-N-K-Y is also one of them. And yeah, they’ll monitor incoming emails. And they have sort of different measures and different methods they use for mediating or just intercepting phishing emails and quarantining them automatically without really any input from the employee in terms of they’re having to make a decision, “Oh, is this safe or not?” It will automatically quarantine it and they won’t have to worry about that.
Justin Channell:
Okay. Well, thinking about that, there is so much training and there is this market that’s there, it seems like phishing’s probably going to evolve in the future and become something that’s a little bit harder to detect. Do you have any predictions on what might happen in regards to that?
Luke Leal:
Well, half the battle is actually first getting to the recipient. So, usually they’ll use email and that’s where I’ve seen the most in terms of changes. So they’re always trying to use different tactics because the phishing companies I mentioned before, the phishing service companies I mentioned before, and Microsoft, Gmail, they’re always changing their filters and updating them to block phishing emails and other threats. So yeah, they constantly have to adapt and change their methods. And yeah, I think lately they’ve been using… Most I’ve seen lately have used different encoding methods. There’s a method called Zero font and that just changes the font size. It’ll use a random font size in the HTML of the phishing email. And yeah, the HTML of the phishing email, it’ll look nothing like the page that’s actually loaded.
Luke Leal:
So yeah, in terms of the last few years, that’s how I’ve seen changes being made to it because the actual phishing page itself, it really hasn’t changed too much in terms of the look and the feel of it. It’s just trying to do the same thing it’s always done, which is replicate the actual login page. It just tries to replicate it as closely as possible. So there hasn’t been too much differences in how that’s done. So yeah, really the changes I’ve seen have been in the delivery of it. Now, behind the scenes, on the phishing pages, that’s where it’s changed a little bit.
Luke Leal:
With so many new services and accounts requiring multi-factor like Visa cards, they have Verified by Visa that requires multi-factor and I think the same with MasterCard. It is the same with MasterCard they don’t use Verified by Visa, I think they use MasterCard Secure. And so they’ll target the multi-factor. And yeah, it’s been a little, I guess, maybe disconcerting in terms of how effective it’s been. Because, multi-factor came on the scene and it was supposed to sort of really help prevent these type of issues but it turns out there’s different flaws that are kind of specific in how the multi-factor is implemented. So yeah, it can vary depending on who they target, but yeah, it’s definitely possible for them to bypass or authenticate your two-factor authentication, whether it’s through SMS, like you’re receiving the SMS code, that’s the most common method that’s used to steal it. They can even still Google two-factor authentication, although I don’t really see that, but that is known to exist. So yeah, there’s just a lot of different things that they’re constantly trying out, to see what’s most successful.
Justin Channell:
Yeah. Because, I know at this point it seems… There’s always been debate as to whether or not SMS is secure. I kind of lean on the side of, it’s not. And I felt that it was really getting towards that a couple of months ago when it was unveiled that some hackers were claiming that they have rootkits installed at every major provider; which it’s hard to tell whether or not that’s true but if it is, it would make for the SMS 2FA to be very insecure. So it’s hard to tell again, whether or not it’s true, but it definitely seems like it’s where they’re looking and where it’s going to be most likely to cause problems.
Luke Leal:
Yeah. Yeah. And in these cases, the ones I’ve dealt with, in order to get around the SMS or not get around it, but in order for them to receive the SMS code, they’ll act like a man in the middle tech. So, the phishing page will ask for your phone number. And so they get the customer’s phone number and then they’re able to sort of replay that to the actual service, the legitimate service. And so the legitimate service then sends the SMS to the person that’s being phished, the victim. And then the phishing page will ask them for the SMS code they received. And since the victim thinks it’s the legit service, they just input it and then the person that’s doing the phishing can then use that again to actually access the service. Because when the victim put it into the phishing page, it didn’t actually authenticate with the legitimate service, it was just sent to the attacker. So the code wasn’t used yet. So it’s still valid for a certain length of time, depending on the service.
Justin Channell:
Okay. Well, I think that’s all the questions I had about phishing. I’m going to end with a question we’ve been asking every guest on this show, which is, what’s the most interesting piece of malware you’ve ever seen? And you know what, for this one let’s go with bonus points if it’s a phishing campaign.
Luke Leal:
Yeah, sure. The most interesting one is probably [crosstalk 00:23:20] phishing recently is some of the two-factor that I’ve seen target the MasterCard and also Visa cards that were out of Europe. Specifically, they were targeting a bank in the Nordic region. And so yeah, they would send out fake Netflix phishing emails. It would say, “Oh, you need to verify your information. There’s been some payment conflict issue.” And so the person would click the URL and load the phishing page and they would go through the process.
Luke Leal:
And yeah, this one used two-factor authentication. It used the Verified by Visa and MasterCard Secure services which are tied to the person’s card’s issuing bank, and it’s done through SMS primarily. And so it’s used whenever the person is paying at checkout, they’ll do the two-factor authentication to sort of authenticate the purchase with their bank, the bank that issued that card they’re using. And so typically that code is only supposed to be useful once, it’s supposed to be a onetime password and then it’s invalid.
Luke Leal:
But in this case it was valid, I think, for up to five minutes. And so it could be reused to purchase any items. And there was no limit on the purchase price, so it wasn’t verifying the purchase price. So yeah, once the attacker had the two-factor code and all the card’s details, they could fully use it without really any worry of being blocked or any fraud measures preventing their transaction going through. So yeah, it was just another example of kind of the weakness in using SMS because the companies have to add some sort of delay in terms of how long the multi-factor code will stay alive.
Luke Leal:
And one of the reasons they have to do this is just because the SMS network and the cellular networks, so I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but sometimes you’ll get a delay in a text message and SMS message. You’ll send it to someone or some will send you a message and it could take, sometimes, a few minutes. And so the same thing happens with the two-factor authentication codes that they try and send you. So they have to allow for that type of delay that may happen. They have to incorporate that into their timeout period. And so yeah, some of the multi-factor codes will be good for five minutes, maybe longer.
Justin Channell:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
Luke Leal:
Yeah. That kind of lessens their security too. Also, when you take into account they can be used with some specific groups, they can be used more than once in a period of time.
Justin Channell:
Yeah. Wow.
Luke Leal:
Yeah. That’s the most interesting piece of malware I’ve seen. I think I wrote an article on it. There’s a post on our blog.sucuri.net.
Justin Channell:
Yeah. We’ll put that link in the show notes. I definitely remember that one. Well, Luke, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking phishing to us.
Luke Leal:
Sure, sure.
Justin Channell:
Great.
Luke Leal:
Thank you.
Justin Channell:
Have a good one. Thanks again to Luke for joining us here on the Sit-down. We’ll be back with another episode next month. So be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Also, be sure to follow us on social media at Sucuri Security and check us out at sucuri.net, that’s S-U-C-U-R-I.net. I’m Justin Channell. And this has been the Sucuri Sit-Down. Stay safe out there.
Alycia Mitchell
Pilar Garcia
Brian Bautista
Luke Leal
Rianna MacLeod
Denis Sinegubko
Tiago Pellegrini
Fioravante Souza