New analysis of a phishing campaign shows how cybercriminals use brand impersonation of the platforms they need to compromise accounts and takeover legitimate services.
Every day there seems to be a new term for yet another creative attack technique. The latest is phishception (a play on words from the movie Inception) coined by security analysts at cybersecurity company Netcraft.
They use the term to explain a new attack where threat actors need access to SendGrid accounts so they can misuse the legitimate emailing capabilities for future phishing attacks. So what do they do? They impersonate SendGrid to SendGrid customers to compromise accounts so they can send emails using SendGrid (feeling the Inception reference yet?).
Once compromised, attackers leveraged the credibility of the legitimate email sending platform to bypass security solutions to other targets.
One other interesting note is how attackers utilized serverless web pages; as Netcraft describe it:
“The phishing page itself is also hosted using JSPen, a tool that allows entire web pages to be generated on the fly inside the browser based on code passed as a URL fragment after the # character.”
I suspect we’ll be hearing more about JSPen in the future, as it appears to be a powerful tool for phishing, including the checking for MFA.
This all can be avoided if the original targets were vigilant and skeptical of initial emails stating their password needed to be reset. Scrutinizing from addresses, email contents and destination URLs that are taught via security awareness training can make the difference here and stop this kind of sophisticated attack in its tracks.
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