Beware Of Credentials Phishing
In a growing trend known as credentials phishing, criminal actors are impersonatimg legitimate brands and services by crafting similar-looking websites where unsuspecting users are then asked enter their account information.
Once entered, account details are forwarded to the cyber criminals, completely by-passing malware detection software. From there, those criminals can do what they want, often for years and without being detected. And now with enterprise migration toward cloud-based email and services, credential phishing is more popular than ever.
The email identity expers at Agari have carried aout a detailed analysis which demonstates just what a succesful attack method credentails phishing can be. In order to better understand the problem, the Agari Cyber Intelligence Division (ACID) seeded over 8,000 phishing sites with credentials under our control and then monitored these accounts to directly observe the actions taken by a cyber criminal post-compromise.
The Results Were Astonishing
ACID's research showed that nearly a quarter (23%) of compromised accounts were automatically accessed immediately at the time of compromiseto validate the authenticity of the credentials. Based on the unique characteristics of the phishing sites and the behavior attributed to account access, we were able to cluster 85% of this auto-validation activity into just three families of attacks, indicating this activity is driven by a very small number of threat actors and/or phishing kits.
Agari researchers identified a user agent string, BAV2ROPC, that was commonly associated with automated validation activity. This unique user agent string, which is linked to the use of an OAuth 2.0 token, was associated with auto-validation activity more than 90% of the times we saw it.
Regardless of whether credentials were automatically validated, nearly all of the compromised accounts (92%) were accessed manually by a threat actor.
Almost one in five accounts (18%) were accessed within the first hour post- compromise, half were accessed within 12 hours of the compromise, and nearly all (91%) of the accounts were accessed within a week after they were compromised. When manually accessing a compromised account, threat actors primarily logged in using a web browser (85%) rather than using an email client that was used in 15% of cases.
While a majority of compromised accounts were only accessed one time by actors, Agari observed a number of examples where a cyber criminal maintained persistent and continuous access to a compromised account over ectended periods.
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