An Iranian threat actor is conducting a spear phishing operation against Israeli officials, according to researchers at Check Point. The targets have included the former Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, a former Major General of the Israeli Defense Forces, and a former US Ambassador to Israel.
“One of the straightforward purposes of this campaign is to gain access to the inboxes of its victims, specifically for Yahoo inboxes from the flows we observed,” the researchers write. “The phishing pages include several stages- asking the user for their account ID followed by an SMS code verification page. It is interesting to note that the truncated phone number within the phishing page was customized specifically for the target, and it corresponds to the public records. We suspect that once the victim enters his account ID, the phishing backend server would send a password recovery request to Yahoo, and the 2FA code would allow the attackers to gain access to the victim’s inbox.”
Check Point notes that the attackers used an identity service to add legitimacy to their phishing sites.
“Using a legitimate service to facilitate an attack is always a great bonus for a threat actor,” the researchers write. “It saves resources and the need to develop anything on their own, not to mention that the target and any security solution would be less suspecting of a legitimate service. In this case, the attackers used validation.com, an identity verification service created by the domain registration giant NameCheap, that allows anyone to easily validate their customer’s identity by providing an option to scan an ID or documents directly from the webcam, or by uploading a file.... In this campaign, we have seen one redirection flow from Litby[.]us which leads to a URL on validation.com, and as part of our analysis, we had an indication that the attacker obtained the Passport scan of another high end target. This scan was likely collected by the same means, highlighting the effectiveness of this technique.”
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