Phishing Campaign Targets GitHub Users

GitHub has issued an alert warning of a phishing campaign targeting users by impersonating the popular DevOps tool CircleCI, BleepingComputer reports. The phishing emails inform users that they’ll need to click on a link and log into their GitHub account in order to review CircleCI’s new terms of service. The phishing site is designed to harvest credentials as well as time-based one-time-password (TOTP) authentication codes.

“Clicking the link takes the user to a phishing site that looks like the GitHub login page but steals any credentials entered,” GitHub says. “For users with TOTP-based two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled, the phishing site also relays any TOTP codes to the threat actor and GitHub in real time, allowing the threat actor to break into accounts protected by TOTP-based 2FA. Accounts protected by hardware security keys are not vulnerable to this attack.”

GitHub says “the campaign has impacted many victim organizations.” The alert outlines the following actions taken by the attacker after compromising an account:

• “If the threat actor successfully steals GitHub user account credentials, they may quickly create GitHub personal access tokens (PATs), authorize OAuth applications, or add SSH keys to the account in order to preserve access in the event that the user changes their password.
• “In many cases, the threat actor immediately downloads private repository contents accessible to the compromised user, including those owned by organization accounts and other collaborators.
• “The threat actor uses VPN or proxy providers to download private repository data via compromised user accounts.
• “If a compromised account has organization management permissions, the threat actor may create new GitHub user accounts and add them to an organization in an effort to establish persistence.”

CircleCI issued the following statement on the campaign:

“CircleCI will not require users to login to review any updates to Our Terms of Service. Additionally, these phishing attempts include links that send users to circle-ci[.]com, which is not owned by CircleCI. Any emails from CircleCI should only include links to circleci.com 52 or its sub-domains. If you believe you or someone on your team may have accidentally clicked a link in this email, please immediately rotate your credentials for both GitHub and CircleCI, and audit your systems for any unauthorized activity.”

New-school security awareness training can enable your employees to recognize phishing attempts.

BleepingComputer has the story.