Defcon 27 - Phishing in the Cloud Era
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This document discusses how cybercriminals are increasingly using cloud services to conduct phishing attacks. It provides examples of phishing-as-a-service models that allow easy hosting of phishing sites in the cloud. Specific case studies are described where phishing sites used cloud services like Azure and Google Cloud Platform to appear more legitimate or spread malware. The document concludes that while cloud adoption benefits organizations, it has also attracted criminals who leverage the cloud's power and shared security model for financially motivated attacks.
Defcon 27 - Phishing in the Cloud Era
- 1. Phishing in the cloud era Ashwin Vamshi & Abhinav Singh
- 2. ❖ Staff Security Research Engineer, Netskope ➢ Innate interest in targeted attacks and malwares using cloud services. ➢ Identifying malwares, campaigns and threat actors using ‘cloud as an attack vector’ Ashwin Vamshi 2
- 3. Abhinav Singh ❖ Staff Security Research Engineer, Netskope ➢ Background in Malware research, reverse engineering, incident response and cloud security. ➢ Author and speaker. 3
- 4. Agenda 4 Introduction Cloud abuse techniques and case-studies Motivation behind abusing cloud Conclusion
- 6. Attacks “at the scale of cloud” • Wide-scale adoption of cloud services by cybercriminals with a large upscale around phishing attacks. • The phished baits are designed to mimic login pages of popular cloud services • Phishing attacks hosted in the cloud are highly effective and hard to detect. • Example - Phishing website with a Microsoft domain and a Microsoft- issued SSL certificate, asking for Office 365 credentials. 6
- 7. 7 BEC- It Still Exists!! Source: Fincen.gov
- 8. BEC in the cloud era - Problem statement • Attacks with SSL certificates/Cloud services to appear legitimate. • Tricks corporate users that are savvy enough to check that the domain and SSL certificate of a website is from a trusted origin. • Slow take-downs, fast recovery. 8
- 9. 1. PhaaS - Phishing as a Service Cloud Abuse techniques
- 10. PhaaS - Attack Description • Cloud hosted Phishing-as-a-Service cyber-crime model. • Click, Build & Host. • Flexible plans with wide variety of payment options being accepted. • Additional features like user training, 24/7 customer support and remote monitoring. 10
- 12. Hackshit – Infection Monitoring Page 12 • The phished baits were served with SSL certificates signed by LetsEncrypt or Comodo. • TLD’s: “moe”, “tn”, “cat”, “wtf”, and “space”. • Websites were built using a file uploading and sharing platform named Pomf. • Pomf clones not indexed by search engines.
- 13. Hackshit – Source Code View 13
- 14. Hackshit - Pointers • Recorded the victims credentials via websocket service hosted in the cloud. • Shift of service: Amazon > Evennode > Now. • Takedowns → resurface and reuse attack elements. • Classic example of reusing the same attack elements onto new cloud accounts. 14
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- 16. 2. Phishing Attacks Hosted via Public Cloud 16 Abusing popular cloud SaaS, IaaS applications like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Azuresites, Googlesites etc. Infection vector Email attachment → Decoy documents Specifically targets corporate users using cloud applications.
- 17. 17 Malicious PDF Attachments – Case-study
- 18. Phish → Microsoft-issued SSL certificate & Microsoft-owned domain 18
- 19. Phishing webpage hosted in Azure blob storage 19
- 20. 3. Cloud Fan-out Effect • Infection spreading through the default Sync-&- Share property of SaaS services. • Use of collaboration tools that automatically sync email attachments to SaaS apps. • Self inflicted propagation of malicious file across the peer network. • Even if unsuccessful- may leave the target vulnerable to future attacks. (Default Allow Policy) 20
- 21. CloudPhishing Fan-out – Case Study A victim inadvertently shares the phishing document with colleagues, whether internal or external, via a cloud service. Secondary propagation vector. Shared users lose the context of the document’s external origin and may trust the internally shared document as if it were created internally.
- 22. CloudPhishing Fan Out- Case Study 22
- 23. Document Decoys - Default Allow Policy & Annotations
- 24. Attack Description - Default Allow Policy 24 ABUSES THE “DEFAULT ALLOW” POLICY FOR POPULAR PDF READERS. WARNING FROM PDF VIEWING APPLICATION POINTING TO AN EXTERNAL LINK CONNECTING TO THE CLOUD APPLICATION. FOR LEGITIMATE REASONS. THE NORTH ALWAYS “REMEMBERS”
- 25. Case Study - Zoom Zoom!! 25
- 26. Case Study II – PDF Annotations 26
- 27. Attack Description - PDF Annotations 27 Indicates that the attackers plan to reuse the decoy template by appending new links when the URL is taken down. Annotations mostly carried out using RAD PDF annotator by threat actors. Attack campaign artifacts are simply being reused by the malware author to rapidly adapt to malicious file takedowns.
- 28. Targeted attacks abusing Google Cloud Platform Open Redirection
- 29. Attack Description • Phishing email containing PDF decoy document which points to Google app engine. • Abuses Google Cloud app engine’s open redirection to deliver malware. • A design weakness that allows the attacker to construct a redirection chain. • The URL redirection case falls under the category of Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards as per OWASP. 29
- 30. GCP Open redirection chain The user is logged out from appengine.google.com and a response status code ‘302’ is generated for URL redirection. – As this action gets executed, the user is in turn redirected to google.com/url using the query “?continue=”. – Using this redirection logic, the destination landing page is reached. • These Themed decoys primarily targeted governments, banking and financial firms worldwide via phishing emails sent by the attackers posing as legitimate customers of those institutions.
- 31. Motivation behind abusing cloud services 31 Ease of use and abuse. Reduces the infrastructure overhead. Way more powerful than traditional hosting or computing services. Significantly cheaper than traditional attack methods (No DGA or BPH needed). Gives attackers protection by default (encrypted traffic, API driven communication etc).
- 32. Conclusion 32 Cloud adoption helps organizations in improving their IT infrastructure and control cost. Its rapid adoption has also caught the attention of cyber criminals who are financially motivated. Cloud Solution Providers (CSP) have adopted the concept of shared responsibility model for securing the workloads. Organizations should carefully assess the risks and potential threats when moving towards the cloud.