Tag: malware

More phishing…

There’s more than one way to hook a fish.

Lets say you’ve become comfortable in your ability to recognize phishing email. You’re able to spot the strange “From” address hidden behind the reassuring “Billing Department” or “Customer Service” label that’s been applied. And even if that looks like it might be legit you know how to hover over links in the email and recognize something that says it came from Amazon should have amazon.com/ as the last part of the web address that comes before that very first single forward slash, “/”.

A business web address should always be https://businessname.com/maybemore or https://www.businessname.com/maybemore or https://businessname.org/maybemore and so on. The critical part of the address that tells you where the link will take you is between the paired // and the very first single /.

What do you do when everything looks legit? The “From:” doesn’t look strange, the subject isn’t alarming.

The message itself doesn’t try and make you panic. You can see the full email address and it looks legit. There’s no business website listed in the message but the part of the email address after the @ looks legit. And if you put the part after the @ into your web browser it does go to a legit website, in this case “equitybrands.com”.

Stop right now! There’s no contact info provided in the message. No corporate website identified. No contact phone or email provided. And there’s no info what this is about. Did you buy something and there’s a payment issue, forget to return something, detail about a pending refund…? There’s just nothing except a big blue “View File” button.

In case you can’t resist taking a peek at the “Payment doc.excel” file I did it for you.

It isn’t a regular Excel file because the last part of the file name would be .xls or .xlsx. Sorry but you do need to know that. Ignoring all this I clicked the “View File” button. It got me to the screen below.

If you haven’t got suspicious yet you should turn and run now.

There’s no identifying information for the company.

Why are you being asked for your email? It came to your email. Why is it asking for that now?

What password do you need to enter? Since your email is asked for it seems like a reasonable password would be your email password. Don’t!! Your email password is to get into YOUR email. Nobody else needs that.

Then there’s a conflicting statement at the bottom of this web page. See just below the “Submit” button? It says “Never submit passwords through Google Forms.” That’s because this phishing message is bringing you to a Google Form to collect your email and password. The criminal can’t prevent Google from showing you that warning on a Google Form but they’re hoping you won’t see it or will ignore it.

In summary, even if everything looks legit, if you’re asked to enter your email and password somewhere and you got there by clicking a link in an email DON’T DO IT!

Email and password are for you to get into your accounts. Don’t give them up at a website you got to by an email link.

Always go to the website your usual way and login. Then check your account to see if anything is needed.

If it isn’t a website you remember having an account at do not, do not, do not provide credentials to login. Call the business and ask what’s up!

Certified Information Systems Security Professional, CISSP

Security. Human factors are always important.

I hold a CISSP certification. Information security is something I’ve found intriguing since I first started my technology career. One of the first user trainings I developed was around the time of the “I love you” malware that struck via a deceptive email attachment. And to this day email continues to be a vector for compromising systems. Or actually I should say, email account holders continue to be a vector for attacking systems.

My office at the time of “I love you” wasn’t struck by it but we would have been except for our mail system. Everyone in the business, about 160 people at the time, had gotten the system security training. And a special alert had gone out after the training warning of “I love you”. By and large the people in the company were well educated professionals with uncommonly high expectations around privacy and confidentiality. Our work was providing counseling and permanency for youth and families involved with various states’ child and family services departments.

What I mean to say is the staff of the organization all understood and practiced privacy and confidentiality and so were an interested and engaged audience for the security training.

With the above as background, this is the story of “I love you” in my office.

One day the Executive Director’s Administrative Assistant called me and said, “Alan, I think I’ve done something I shouldn’t have.” She explained she had gotten an email from the building’s manager with an “I love you” attachment. The man was someone she dealt with often and was on good terms with. She was married and was a bit upset by getting an email with such a bold attachment. She was also intrigued wondering why he would send it to her and what message might be inside.

She didn’t delete the email immediately but kept it and wondered what message it might contain. Finally she opened the email and attempted to open the attachment. Nothing happened.

Our mail system was Lotus Notes client and server. The malware relied on Visual Basic Scripting in Microsoft Outlook and so was unable to propagate in our environment.

This is a case where a knowledgeable person with a commitment to privacy and confidentiality and who had gotten security training as well as read the follow up warnings about “I love you” nearly caused a security incident because of curiosity! The only reason there was no incident was because of a technical feature of our environment.

She realized something was wrong when there was no message to see. And then she relied on her training, called me, and confessed to maybe doing something wrong.

This is a lesson that’s stayed with me. You can have good people and good training but good technical measures are still needed to back them up. People will occasionally do things they suspect might not be in their best interest because of some other overriding impulse, like curiosity.

And this brings me to something else, earning CPE (Continuing Professional Education) credits to keep my CISSP current. I generally enjoy the briefings and learn many interesting things while earning CPEs. However I do struggle sometimes because it is difficult at times to find CPE courses that are not too strongly vendor centric. My preference is for training that is less about the knobs and switches of a particular technology and more about the ideas behind threats and countermeasures.

I was really pleased to get a mailing from (ISC)2 the other day. It introduced courses that are free for members that providing training and CPEs. Much of the training looks to be very relevant to my interests and I’m very excited to get started!

Courses like:

  • Techniques for Malware Analysis
  • Web Appliction Penetration Testing
  • Gaining Support for Your Security Program
  • Introduction to NIST Cybersecurity Framework

…and others are all about topics that I expect to be quite enjoyable.

I also will be producing another post with some examples of phishing attacks I’ve received. Some that were quite good and nearly motivated me to reveal credentials.