How to Avoid Being Phished by Your Phone

By now you’ve probably heard of the term “phishing”—when scammers try to fool you into revealing your personal info or sending money, usually via email — but what about “vishing”? Vishing, or voice phishing, is basically the same practice, but done by phone.

There are a few reasons why it’s important for you to know about vishing. First off, voice phishing scams are prevalent and growing. A common example around tax season is the IRS scam, where fraudsters make threatening calls to taxpayers pretending to be IRS agents and demanding money for back taxes. Another popular example is the phony tech support scam, in which a scammer calls you claiming that they represent a security provider.

The scammers might say they’ve noticed a problem with your computer or device and want money to fix the problem, or even request direct access to your machine. They might also ask you to download software to do a “security scan” just so they can get you to install a piece of malware that steals your personal info. They might even try to sell you a worthless computer warranty or offer a phony refund.

These kinds of attacks can be very persuasive because the scammers employ “social engineering” techniques. This involves plays on emotion, urgency, authority, and even sometimes threats. The end result, scammers manipulate their victims into doing something for fraudulent purposes. Because scammers can reach you at any time on your most private device, your smartphone, it can feel more direct and personal.

Vishing scams don’t always require a phone call from a real person. Often, scammers use a generic or targeted recording, claiming to be from your bank or credit union. For instance, they might ask you to enter your bank account number or other personal details, which opens you up to identity theft.

Increasingly, scammers use AI tools in voice cloning attacks. With readily available voice cloning apps, scammers can replicate someone else’s voice with remarkable accuracy. While initially developed for benign purposes such as voice assistants and entertainment, scammers now use voice cloning tools to exploit unsuspecting victims.

The incoming number might even appear to have come from your bank, thanks to a trick called “caller ID spoofing,” which allows scammers to fake the origin of the call. They can do this by using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which connects calls over the internet instead of traditional phone circuits, allowing them to easily assign incoming phone numbers.

Don’t risk losing your money or valuable personal info to these scams. Here’s how to avoid vishing attacks:

• If you receive a phone call from either a person or a recording requesting passwords, personal info, or money, just hang up.
• Be skeptical of the caller ID — even if a call appears to be coming from a legitimate business, it might be a spoofed ID.
• If you think your bank might be calling you, but aren’t sure, hang up and call your bank back directly to confirm any potential issues. If you know it was a scam call purportedly coming from your bank, call your bank immediately to make them aware of the problem.
• When it comes to tech support, know that a trustworthy internet security provider like McAfee will never call you out of the blue, requesting money, info, or access to your devices.
• Register your mobile phone number, as well as your home phone, on the “do not call” registry to reduce your exposure.
• Limit your exposure further by removing your personal info from risky data broker sites with our Personal Data Cleanup service.
• Establish a unique safe word with loved ones to beat back voice clone attacks. In the case of an unusual call or message, use this safe word to verify each other’s identity. Avoid using easily guessable phrases and periodically change the safe word for added security.

The post How to Avoid Being Phished by Your Phone appeared first on McAfee Blog.

EvilSlackbot - A Slack Bot Phishing Framework For Red Teaming Exercises

EvilSlackbot

A Slack Attack Framework for conducting Red Team and phishing exercises within Slack workspaces.

Disclaimer

This tool is intended for Security Professionals only. Do not use this tool against any Slack workspace without explicit permission to test. Use at your own risk.

Background

Thousands of organizations utilize Slack to help their employees communicate, collaborate, and interact. Many of these Slack workspaces install apps or bots that can be used to automate different tasks within Slack. These bots are individually provided permissions that dictate what tasks the bot is permitted to request via the Slack API. To authenticate to the Slack API, each bot is assigned an api token that begins with xoxb or xoxp. More often than not, these tokens are leaked somewhere. When these tokens are exfiltrated during a Red Team exercise, it can be a pain to properly utilize them. Now EvilSlackbot is here to automate and streamline that process. You can use EvilSlackbot to send spoofed Slack messages, phishing links, files, and search for secrets leaked in slack.

Phishing Simulations

In addition to red teaming, EvilSlackbot has also been developed with Slack phishing simulations in mind. To use EvilSlackbot to conduct a Slack phishing exercise, simply create a bot within Slack, give your bot the permissions required for your intended test, and provide EvilSlackbot with a list of emails of employees you would like to test with simulated phishes (Links, files, spoofed messages)

Installation

EvilSlackbot requires python3 and Slackclient

pip3 install slackclient

Usage

usage: EvilSlackbot.py [-h] -t TOKEN [-sP] [-m] [-s] [-a] [-f FILE] [-e EMAIL]
                       [-cH CHANNEL] [-eL EMAIL_LIST] [-c] [-o OUTFILE] [-cL]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

Required:
  -t TOKEN, --token TOKEN
                        Slack Oauth token

Attacks:
  -sP, --spoof          Spoof a Slack message, customizing your name, icon, etc
                        (Requires -e,-eL, or -cH)
  -m, --message         Send a message as the bot associated with your token
                        (Requires -e,-eL, or -cH)
  -s, --search          Search slack for secrets with a keyword
  -a, --attach          Send a message containing a malicious attachment (Requires -f
                        and -e,-eL, or -cH)

Arguments:
  -f FILE, --file FILE  Path to file attachment
  -e EMAIL, --email EMAIL
                        Email of target
  -cH    CHANNEL, --channel CHANNEL
                        Target Slack Channel (Do not include #)
  -eL EMAIL_LIST, --email_list EMAIL_LIST
                        Path to list of emails separated by newline
  -c, --check           Lookup and display the permissions and available attacks
                        associated with your provided token.
  -o OUTFILE, --outfile OUTFILE
                        Outfile to store search results
  -cL, --channel_list   List all public Slack channels

Token

To use this tool, you must provide a xoxb or xoxp token.

Required:
  -t TOKEN, --token TOKEN  (Slack xoxb/xoxp token)

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <token>

Attacks

Depending on the permissions associated with your token, there are several attacks that EvilSlackbot can conduct. EvilSlackbot will automatically check what permissions your token has and will display them and any attack that you are able to perform with your given token.

Attacks:
  -sP, --spoof   Spoof a Slack message, customizing your name, icon, etc (Requires -e,-eL, or -cH)

  -m, --message  Send a message as the bot associated with your token (Requires -e,-eL, or -cH)

  -s, --search   Search slack for secrets with a keyword 

  -a, --attach   Send a message containing a malicious attachment (Requires -f and -e,-eL, or -cH)

Spoofed messages (-sP)

With the correct token permissions, EvilSlackbot allows you to send phishing messages while impersonating the botname and bot photo. This attack also requires either the email address (-e) of the target, a list of target emails (-eL), or the name of a Slack channel (-cH). EvilSlackbot will use these arguments to lookup the SlackID of the user associated with the provided emails or channel name. To automate your attack, use a list of emails.

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <xoxb token> -sP -e <email address>

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <xoxb token> -sP -eL <email list>

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <xoxb token> -sP -cH <Channel name>

Phishing Messages (-m)

With the correct token permissions, EvilSlackbot allows you to send phishing messages containing phishing links. What makes this attack different from the Spoofed attack is that this method will send the message as the bot associated with your provided token. You will not be able to choose the name or image of the bot sending your phish. This attack also requires either the email address (-e) of the target, a list of target emails (-eL), or the name of a Slack channel (-cH). EvilSlackbot will use these arguments to lookup the SlackID of the user associated with the provided emails or channel name. To automate your attack, use a list of emails.

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <xoxb token> -m -e <email address>

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <xoxb token> -m -eL <email list>

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <xoxb token> -m -cH <Channel name>

Secret Search (-s)

With the correct token permissions, EvilSlackbot allows you to search Slack for secrets via a keyword search. Right now, this attack requires a xoxp token, as xoxb tokens can not be given the proper permissions to keyword search within Slack. Use the -o argument to write the search results to an outfile.

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <xoxp token> -s -o <outfile.txt>

Attachments (-a)

With the correct token permissions, EvilSlackbot allows you to send file attachments. The attachment attack requires a path to the file (-f) you wish to send. This attack also requires either the email address (-e) of the target, a list of target emails (-eL), or the name of a Slack channel (-cH). EvilSlackbot will use these arguments to lookup the SlackID of the user associated with the provided emails or channel name. To automate your attack, use a list of emails.

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <xoxb token> -a -f <path to file> -e <email address>

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <xoxb token> -a -f <path to file> -eL <email list>

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <xoxb token> -a -f <path to file> -cH <Channel name>

Arguments

Arguments:
  -f FILE, --file FILE  Path to file attachment
  -e EMAIL, --email EMAIL  Email of target
  -cH CHANNEL, --channel CHANNEL  Target Slack Channel (Do not include #)
  -eL EMAIL_LIST, --email_list EMAIL_LIST  Path to list of emails separated by newline
  -c, --check   Lookup and display the permissions and available attacks associated with your provided token.
  -o OUTFILE, --outfile OUTFILE Outfile to store search results
  -cL, --channel_list   List all public Slack channels

Channel Search

With the correct permissions, EvilSlackbot can search for and list all of the public channels within the Slack workspace. This can help with planning where to send channel messages. Use -o to write the list to an outfile.

python3 EvilSlackbot.py -t <xoxb token> -cL

How to Protect Yourself From a Spear Phishing Scam

As the name implies, spear phishing attacks are highly targeted scams. They often occur in professional settings, where the scammers go after one “big phish,” such as a ranking employee with access to finances or data. From there, the scammers employ social engineering (aka manipulation) to trick the target into transferring funds to them or giving them access to sensitive company systems. Sometimes, it’s a mix of both.

Some of the most striking examples of spear phishing attacks come from the Shamoon2 attacks seen in Saudi Arabia back in 2016. Successive waves of attacks ultimately infected machines with malware and destroyed systems.

So, how did this specific spear phishing attack work, exactly? Cybercriminals targeted specific organizations in Saudi Arabia with emails that included malicious attachments in them. Then, when victims clicked and opened the attachment, they were infected, valuable company data was taken and systems were quickly wiped.

Spear phishing has been around for quite some time yet remains as effective as ever. Spear phishing’s success is based on familiarity. Usually, cybercriminals pretend to be an organization or individual that you know and include a piece of content—a link, an email attachment, etc.—that they know you’ll want to interact with.

For example, cybercriminals have taken advantage of tragedies in the headlines and used targeted emails claiming to be a charitable organization asking for donations. In the case of Shamoon2, the attackers lured in victims with a tempting email attachment sent from organizations the victims were likely to trust. But instead of giving to their charity of choice, or opening a seemingly harmless workplace attachment, victims then self-infect their systems with malware.

Moreover, we have seen spear phishing attacks take on an entirely new form with the advent of AI deepfakes. Now, instead of reaching out to victims via email, sophisticated scammers create deepfakes that pose as employees on video calls. All in real-time. Such was the case in Hong Kong in February 2024 where a host of deepfakes pressured a company’s finance officer into transferring $25 million to the scammers running the deepfakes.[i]

Moral of the story: spear phishing (and regular phishing) attacks can be tricky. However, fear not, there’s a lot you can do to stay on top of this threat.

For starters:

Go straight to the source.

Spear phishing attacks can be easily deceiving. In fact, cybercriminals have been able to impersonate known, credible charities or an employer’s business partners and customers. So, if you receive an email from an organization asking for donations or a partner asking you to open a file you didn’t request, a good rule of thumb is to go directly to the organization through a communications channel other than email. Go to the company’s site and do more research from there. That way, you can ensure you’re gaining accurate information and can interact with the right people, rather than cyber-attackers.

Always check for legitimacy first. Spear phishing emails rely on you—they want you to click a link, or open an attachment. But before you do anything, you always need to check an email’s content for legitimacy. Hover over a link and see if it’s going to a reliable URL. Or, if you’re unsure about an email’s content or the source it came from, do a quick Google search and look for other instances of this campaign, and what those instances could tell you about the email’s legitimacy.

Fraudsters do their research — keep your guard up.

Fraudsters select their victims carefully in these targeted attacks. They hunt down employees with access to info and funds and then do their research on them. Using public records, data broker sites, “people finder” sites, and info from social media, fraudsters collect intel on their marks. Armed with that, they can pepper their conversations with references that sound more informed, more personal, and thus more convincing. Just because what’s being said feels or sounds somewhat familiar doesn’t always mean it’s coming from a trustworthy source.

Clean up your online presence.

With that, employees can reduce the amount of personal info others can find online. Features like McAfee Personal Data Cleanup can help remove personal info from some of the riskiest data broker sites out there. I also keep tabs on those sites if more personal info appears on them later. Additionally, employees can set their social media profiles to private by limiting access to “friends and family only,” which denies fraudsters another avenue of info gathering. Using our Social Privacy Manager can make that even easier. With just a few clicks, it can adjust more than 100 privacy settings across their social media accounts — making them more private as a result.

[i] https://metro.co.uk/2024/02/05/horrifying-deepfake-tricks-employee-giving-away-20-million-20225490/

The post How to Protect Yourself From a Spear Phishing Scam appeared first on McAfee Blog.

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A search at DomainTools.com shows at least 60 domain names have been registered over the past two days for domains ending in “twitter.com,” although research so far shows the majority of these domains have been registered “defensively” by private individuals to prevent the domains from being purchased by scammers.

Those include carfatwitter.com, which Twitter/X truncated to carfax.com when the domain appeared in user messages or tweets. Visiting this domain currently displays a message that begins, “Are you serious, X Corp?”

Update: It appears Twitter/X has corrected its mistake, and no longer truncates any domain ending in “twitter.com” to “x.com.”

Original story:

The same message is on other newly registered domains, including goodrtwitter.com (goodrx.com), neobutwitter.com (neobux.com), roblotwitter.com (roblox.com), square-enitwitter.com (square-enix.com) and yandetwitter.com (yandex.com). The message left on these domains indicates they were defensively registered by a user on Mastodon whose bio says they are a systems admin/engineer. That profile has not responded to requests for comment.

A number of these new domains including “twitter.com” appear to be registered defensively by Twitter/X users in Japan. The domain netflitwitter.com (netflix.com, to Twitter/X users) now displays a message saying it was “acquired to prevent its use for malicious purposes,” along with a Twitter/X username.

The domain mentioned at the beginning of this story — fedetwitter.com — redirects users to the blog of a Japanese technology enthusiast. A user with the handle “amplest0e” appears to have registered space-twitter.com, which Twitter/X users would see as the CEO’s “space-x.com.” The domain “ametwitter.com” already redirects to the real americanexpress.com.

Some of the domains registered recently and ending in “twitter.com” currently do not resolve and contain no useful contact information in their registration records. Those include firefotwitter[.]com (firefox.com), ngintwitter[.]com (nginx.com), and webetwitter[.]com (webex.com).

Sean McNee, vice president of research and data at DomainTools, told KrebsOnSecurity it appears Twitter/X did not properly limit its redirection efforts.

“Bad actors could register domains as a way to divert traffic from legitimate sites or brands given the opportunity — many such brands in the top million domains end in x, such as webex, hbomax, xerox, xbox, and more,” McNee said. “It is also notable that several other globally popular brands, such as Rolex and Linux, were also on the list of registered domains.”

The apparent oversight by Twitter/X was cause for amusement and amazement from many former users who have migrated to other social media platforms since the new CEO took over. Matthew Garrett, a lecturer at U.C. Berkeley’s School of Information, summed up the Schadenfreude thusly:

“Twitter just doing a ‘redirect links in tweets that go to x.com to twitter.com instead but accidentally do so for all domains that end x.com like eg spacex.com going to spacetwitter.com’ is not absolutely the funniest thing I could imagine but it’s high up there.”

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Thread Hijacking: Phishes That Prey on Your Curiosity

Thread hijacking attacks. They happen when someone you know has their email account compromised, and you are suddenly dropped into an existing conversation between the sender and someone else. These missives draw on the recipient’s natural curiosity about being copied on a private discussion, which is modified to include a malicious link or attachment. Here’s the story of a thread hijacking attack in which a journalist was copied on a phishing email from the unwilling subject of a recent scoop.

In Sept. 2023, the Pennsylvania news outlet LancasterOnline.com published a story about Adam Kidan, a wealthy businessman with a criminal past who is a major donor to Republican causes and candidates, including Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa).

Several months after that piece ran, the story’s author Brett Sholtis received two emails from Kidan, both of which contained attachments. One of the messages appeared to be a lengthy conversation between Kidan and a colleague, with the subject line, “Re: Successfully sent data.” The second missive was a more brief email from Kidan with the subject, “Acknowledge New Work Order,” and a message that read simply, “Please find the attached.”

Sholtis said he clicked the attachment in one of the messages, which then launched a web page that looked exactly like a Microsoft Office 365 login page. An analysis of the webpage reveals it would check any submitted credentials at the real Microsoft website, and return an error if the user entered bogus account information. A successful login would record the submitted credentials and forward the victim to the real Microsoft website.

But Sholtis said he didn’t enter his Outlook username and password. Instead, he forwarded the messages to LancasterOneline’s IT team, which quickly flagged them as phishing attempts.

LancasterOnline Executive Editor Tom Murse said the two phishing messages from Mr. Kidan raised eyebrows in the newsroom because Kidan had threatened to sue the news outlet multiple times over Sholtis’s story.

“We were just perplexed,” Murse said. “It seemed to be a phishing attempt but we were confused why it would come from a prominent businessman we’ve written about. Our initial response was confusion, but we didn’t know what else to do with it other than to send it to the FBI.”

In 2006, Kidan was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to defrauding lenders along with Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist whose corruption became a symbol of the excesses of Washington influence peddling. He was paroled in 2009, and in 2014 moved his family to a home in Lancaster County, Pa.

The FBI hasn’t responded to LancasterOnline’s tip. Messages sent by KrebsOnSecurity to Kidan’s emails addresses were returned as blocked. Messages left with Mr. Kidan’s company, Empire Workforce Solutions, went unreturned.

No doubt the FBI saw the messages from Kidan for what they likely were: The result of Mr. Kidan having his Microsoft Outlook account compromised and used to send malicious email to people in his contacts list.

Thread hijacking attacks are hardly new, but that is mainly true because many Internet users still don’t know how to identify them. The email security firm Proofpoint says it has tracked north of 90 million malicious messages in the last five years that leverage this attack method.

One key reason thread hijacking is so successful is that these attacks generally do not include the tell that exposes most phishing scams: A fabricated sense of urgency. A majority of phishing threats warn of negative consequences should you fail to act quickly — such as an account suspension or an unauthorized high-dollar charge going through.

In contrast, thread hijacking campaigns tend to patiently prey on the natural curiosity of the recipient.

Ryan Kalember, chief strategy officer at Proofpoint, said probably the most ubiquitous examples of thread hijacking are “CEO fraud” or “business email compromise” scams, wherein employees are tricked by an email from a senior executive into wiring millions of dollars to fraudsters overseas.

But Kalember said these low-tech attacks can nevertheless be quite effective because they tend to catch people off-guard.

“It works because you feel like you’re suddenly included in an important conversation,” Kalember said. “It just registers a lot differently when people start reading, because you think you’re observing a private conversation between two different people.”

Some thread hijacking attacks actually involve multiple threat actors who are actively conversing while copying — but not addressing — the recipient.

“We call these multi-persona phishing scams, and they’re often paired with thread hijacking,” Kalember said. “It’s basically a way to build a little more affinity than just copying people on an email. And the longer the conversation goes on, the higher their success rate seems to be because some people start replying to the thread [and participating] psycho-socially.”

The best advice to sidestep phishing scams is to avoid clicking on links or attachments that arrive unbidden in emails, text messages and other mediums. If you’re unsure whether the message is legitimate, take a deep breath and visit the site or service in question manually — ideally, using a browser bookmark so as to avoid potential typosquatting sites.

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