Phishing Scam - Attackers Impersonate US Dept. of Transport

Cyber criminals have impersonated the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) in a two-day phishing campaign that used a combination of tactics, including creating new domains and fake federal sites to appear to be legitimate and to evade  detection. The attackers then sent fake text messages suggesting you can get funds from the US infrastructure bill.

The basic pitch was, with a trillion dollars of government money flowing through the system, the targets, are being invited to bid for some of this Federal money. 

Between August 16th &18th, researchers at the specialist e-mail security provider INKY detected 41 phishing emails offering the bait  of bidding for projects benefiting from a $1 trillion infrastructure spending package recently passed by Congress, according to a report written by Roger Kay, VP of security strategy at  INKY.

The phishing campaign targeted companies across various industries including engineering, energy and architecture, sending potential victims an email in which they’re told that the USDOT is inviting them to submit a bid for a department project by clicking a big blue button with the words “Click Here to Bid.” 

To those familiar with government sites, the domain would appear suspicious given that government sites typically have a .gov suffix. However, “to someone reading through quickly, the domain name might seem at least somewhere in the ballpark of reality,” Kay reported. Unwitting victims who take the bait are led to a site “with reassuring-sounding subdomains like ‘transportation,’ ‘gov,’ and ‘secure,'” Kay wrote. However, the base domain of the site was actually registered in 2019 and “hosts what may or may not be an online casino that appears to cater to Malaysians... Either the site was hijacked, or the site owners are themselves the phishers who used it to impersonate the USDOT.” Kay wrote.

Once on the fake bidding site, targets are then instructed to click on a “Bid” button and sign in with their email provider to connect to “the network.” It also instructed them to contact a fictitious person at another fake domain  with any questions.

Once victims closed the instructions, they were directed to an identical copy of the real USDOT website that the attackers created by copying HTML and CSS from the government’s site onto their phishing site. Once on the imposter USDOT site, targets are invited to click a red “Click Here to Bid” button that brings up a credential-harvesting form with a Microsoft logo and instructions to “Login with your email provider.”

A first attempt to enter credentials is met with a ReCAPTCHA challenge, often used by legitimate sites as an extra security device. However, attackers already captured credentials by this point, Kay noted. If targets make a second attempt to enter credentials, a fake error message appears, after which they are directed to the real USDOT website – “an elegant but perhaps unnecessary flourish that phishers often execute as the final step of their sequence,” Kay wrote.

By creating a new domain, exploiting current events, impersonating a known brand, and launching a credential-harvesting operation, the phishers came up with an attack sufficiently different from known strikes to evade standard detection methods.  

“Since they were brand new, the domains represented zero day vulnerabilities, they had never been seen before and did not appear in threat intelligence feeds commonly referenced by legacy anti-phishing tools... Without a blemish, these sites did not look malicious.” Kay wrote.

INKY:         Threatpost:     CBS Chicago: 

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