Enterprises throughout Australia and the APAC area have been warned that cyber criminals are exploiting common platforms like Atlassian to launch extra convincing phishing assaults on regulation corporations and different companies. These assaults intention to steal worker credentials and breach firm cyber safety defences.
Ryan Economos, APAC subject chief expertise officer at electronic mail safety agency Mimecast, instructed TechRepublic that such phishing assaults are uncommon of their use of Atlassian as a canopy. However he famous that phishing assaults have gotten more and more subtle, due to phishing kits and AI, which make it simpler for cyber criminals to execute their actions.
Atlassian workspaces, Japanese ISPs, and a compliance cowl story
Mimecast’s World Menace Intelligence Report 2024 H1 reported on the emergence of a brand new phishing tactic that used a compliance replace cowl story to focus on regulation agency staff. The phishing assaults:
- Leveraged common native model Atlassian’s workspaces, in addition to different unified workspace platforms, together with Archbee and Nuclino, to ship staff dangerous emails that regarded acquainted and legit.
- Used system compliance updates as a canopy, instructing staff by way of electronic mail that they wanted to replace their gadgets to stay compliant with firm coverage.
- Have been designed to redirect those that clicked the hyperlink to a pretend firm portal, the place attackers might harvest credentials and different delicate data.
- Embedded the phishing hyperlink in an electronic mail despatched from addresses related to Japanese ISPs.
“There’s various personalisation within the emails corresponding to particulars of a ‘system’ and a number of other references to the corporate area they’re sending these campaigns to extend validity,” Mimecast’s report stated.
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“The sender deal with identify at all times refers back to the goal organisation’s area identify with the intention of fooling finish customers into considering it’s from their inner division.”
The rising sophistication of phishing assaults
Economos famous that whereas the marketing campaign initially focused Australian regulation corporations, it has since expanded to different industries and is not confined to the authorized sector. He highlighted a number of points of the marketing campaign that point out growing sophistication amongst risk actors.
Use of Atlassian and different workspaces
Economos stated the rising use of Atlassian workspaces was a more recent growth for the market.
“Mimecast continues to see risk actors making use of providers corresponding to OneDrive and Google Docs to host recordsdata or hyperlinks of their campaigns, however using workspaces corresponding to Atlassian has not been closely abused beforehand,” he stated.
A part of the marketing campaign was an electronic mail that seemed to be from Atlassian’s Confluence product. Mimecast referred to a “noticeable enhance in using Atlassian” to evade detection in current instances.
“Abuse of reputable providers is an ongoing and evolving problem,” Economos stated. “Attackers will proceed to leverage respected sources to launch and host their campaigns, in an try and evade detection.”
SEE: The alarming state of information breaches in Australia in 2024
Harvesting of tracker information intelligence
The marketing campaign used postmark URLs to redirect customers to the unified workspace options. Postmark URLs permit attackers to collect information corresponding to location, browser particulars, and which a part of the e-mail was clicked, enabling them to leverage this intelligence to make the phishing lure extra convincing.
A number of URL obfuscation strategies
Making it harder for customers to establish the true vacation spot of the URL, the phishing marketing campaign used “a number of obfuscation strategies,” Mimecast stated. This consists of a number of redirections throughout the URL, encoded characters, and the insertion of monitoring parameters.
Enlisting unsuspecting Japanese ISPs
Though using Japanese ISPs just isn’t distinctive to this phishing marketing campaign, Economos famous that they have been exploited as soon as once more, as that they had in a number of earlier assaults.
“It continues to show the lengths that risk actors will go to with a purpose to efficiently generate assaults on organisations,” he commented.
Phishing assaults will get simpler to mount — and extra convincing
Phishing remains to be among the many commonest cyber threats amongst organisations, Economos stated.
Generative AI and machine studying, whereas additionally serving to defenders cease assaults, is anticipated to extend the sophistication and enhance the focusing on and content material of phishing campaigns. This may drive defenders’ must detect and rapidly reply to new and novel assault strategies.
SEE: APAC staff are selecting comfort over cyber safety
“The most important evolution has been the rate and accuracy of phishing threats, by means of using phishing kits, automation, and AI-based applied sciences,” Economos stated. “These platforms permit even low-skill-level attackers to launch large-scale campaigns and a capability to rapidly craft extra convincing phishing emails to evade detection by conventional safety instruments.”
Economos additionally famous the rise of pretexting — the place a cyber prison will analysis and pose as a personality to supply a convincing story or “pretext” to trick the phishing sufferer — in addition to Enterprise E mail Compromise, as vital components within the evolution within the phishing risk panorama.
“As our work surfaces proceed to diversify, risk actors are diversifying the vectors they exploit past electronic mail, focusing on social media platforms, collaboration instruments like Microsoft Groups, Slack, and OneDrive proper by means of to vishing and smishing assaults utilizing cellphone calls or textual content messages to deceive victims,” he stated.
