Spam News

Latest Phishing Kits Allow Multi-Factor Authentication Bypass

Phishing attacks allow threat actors to obtain credentials, but multi-factor authentication (MFA) makes it harder for phishing attacks to succeed. With MFA enabled, in addition to a username and password, another method of authentication is required before account access is granted. Microsoft has previously said multi-factor authentication blocks 99.9% of automated account compromise attacks; however, MFA does not guarantee protection. A new breed of phishing kit is being increasingly used to bypass MFA.

Researchers at Proofpoint explained in a recent blog post that phishing kits are now being used that leverage transparent reverse proxy (TRP), which allows browser man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. The phishing kits allow the attackers to compromise browser sessions and steal credentials and session cookies in real-time, allowing a full account takeover without alerting the victim.

There are multiple phishing kits that can often be purchased for a low cost that allow MFA to be bypassed; some are simple with no-frills functionality, while others are more sophisticated and incorporate multiple layers of obfuscation and have modules for performing a range of functions, including the theft of sensitive data such as passwords, Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, and MFA tokens.

With standard phishing attacks, the attackers create a fake login page to trick visitors into disclosing their credentials. Oftentimes the phishing page is a carbon copy of the site it impersonates, with the URL the only sign that the phishing page is not genuine. One of the MitM phishing kits identified by the Proofpoint team does not use these fake pages, instead, it uses TRP to present the genuine landing page to the visitor. This approach makes it impossible for victims to recognize the phishing scam. When a user lands on the page and a request is sent to that service, Microsoft 365 for instance, the attackers capture the username and password before they are sent and steal the session cookies that are sent in response in real-time.

The researchers refer to a study of MitM phishing kits by Stony Brook University and Palo Alto Networks which identified more than 1,200 phishing sites using MitM phishing kits. Worryingly, these phishing sites are often not detected and blocked by security solutions. 43.7% of the domains and 18.9% of the IP addresses were not included on popular blocklists, such as those maintained by VirusTotal. Further, while standard phishing pages typically only have a lifespan of around 24 hours before they are blocked, MitM phishing pages last much longer. 15% of those detected lasted for longer than 20 days before they were added to blocklists.

The use of these phishing kits is increasing, albeit relatively slowly, however, the Proofpoint researchers believe that MitM phishing kits will be much more widely adopted by threat actors in response to the increased use of MFA. “[MitM phishing kits] are easy to deploy, free to use, and have proven effective at evading detection. The industry needs to prepare to deal with blind spots like these before they can evolve in new unexpected directions,” said Proofpoint.

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Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Fight the Phish!

According to the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, phishing accounted for around 80% of all reported phishing attacks in 2019 and since the pandemic began in 2020 phishing attacks and associated scams have been thriving. In 2020, 74% of US organizations experienced a successful phishing attack.

Phishing attacks typically use emails or malicious websites – or both – to obtain sensitive information such as login credentials or to infect devices with malware and viruses. Phishing attacks involve a lure to get the recipient to take a certain action, such as clicking on a hyperlink in an email or opening a malicious email attachment. Email addresses, sender names, phone numbers, and website URLs are often spoofed to trick people into believing they are interacting with a familiar and trusted source.

The 2021 Cost of Phishing Study conducted by the Ponemon Institute/Proofpoint suggests the cost of phishing attacks has quadrupled over the past 6 years, with large U.S. firms now losing an average of $14.83 million a year to phishing attacks. An average-sized U.S. company employing 9,567 people, loses around 63,343 hours every year to phishing attacks, with the cost equating to around $1,500 per employee.

Phishing is the starting point of the costliest cyberattacks. In 2020, more than $1.8 billion was fraudulently obtained in Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks, with the average cost of a BEC attack now $5.97 million. Phishing is often the starting point of ransomware attacks, which can have mitigation costs of the order of tens of millions of dollars. On average, an attack costs $996,000 to resolve.

Phishing may be the most common way for cybercriminals to gain access to email accounts, networks, and sensitive data, but these attacks can easily be prevented with the right technology and user training.

Organizations need to implement email security gateways/spam filtering solutions for all email accounts. This technical measure alone will prevent the majority of phishing emails from arriving in inboxes. Antivirus software and firewalls should be used to protect all endpoints, including computers, phones, tablets, and Internet of Things devices. These solutions should be regularly updated, ideally automatically.

Multi-factor authentication should be used on all accounts that require passwords to login. In the event of a password being obtained in a phishing attack, multi-factor authentication will prevent the password from providing access to the user’s account. Microsoft explained in a 2019 blog post that multi-factor authentication blocks more than 99.9% account compromise attacks.

Employees are the last line of defense in an organization, so it is vital for security awareness training to be provided. Employees need to be taught cybersecurity best practices to eradicate risky behaviors and must learn how to identify and avoid phishing attacks.

Employees should be made aware of the red flags in phishing emails such as call outs to open attachments or click links, unusual wording and formatting, spelling and grammatical errors, threats of negative consequences if rapid action is not taken, and too good to be true offers. If any red flags are identified, it is vital to verify the source of the email or text message and to make content with the sender to confirm a request is authentic. Employees should be conditioned to stop and think before taking any action requested in an email or text message and never to respond, open attachments, or click links in messages if there is any doubt about the sender or request.

According to Verizon, “There is some cause for hope in regard to phishing, as click rates from the combined results of multiple security awareness vendors are going down.” In 2012, phishing email click rates were around 25% but by 2019 they had fallen to around 3% as a result of improved awareness of phishing and more extensive end user training.

Given the scale of the threat from phishing, once-a-year security awareness training sessions are no longer sufficient. While annual training may meet the minimum requirement for compliance with HIPAA, it is not sufficient to reduce the risk of a successful attack to low and acceptable level. Security awareness training for the workforce needs to be an ongoing process, with regular training provided throughout the year accompanied by phishing simulation exercises where the phishing identification skills of employees are put to the test. Through training and phishing simulation exercises, susceptibility to phishing attacks can be greatly reduced.

CISA has produced a tip sheet for Cybersecurity Awareness Month to help individuals fight the phish.

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SolarWinds Orion Hackers Targeting U.S. Organizations with New Spear Phishing Campaign

Microsoft has discovered a large-scale spear phishing campaign being conducted by the Russian Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group behind the SolarWinds Orion supply chain attack.

The spear phishing campaign has been active since at least January 2021 and the APT group, tracked by Microsoft as Nobelium. The APT group has been experimenting and has trialed various delivery techniques, including leveraging the Google Firebase platform to deliver a malicious ISO file via HTML email attachments that deliver a variety of malware payloads.

Nobelium escalated the campaign on May 25, 2021 when it started using the Constant Contact mass-mailing service to distribute messages to targets in a wide range of industry verticals. The latest campaign targeted around 3,000 individual accounts across 150 organizations, most of which were in the United States. Each target had its own unique infrastructure and tooling, which has helped the group stay under the radar.

The attackers gained access to the Constant Contact account of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and delivered spear phishing messages under the guise of a USAID Special Alert. The messages have a reply-to address on the usaid.gov domain and were sent from the in.constantcontact.com domain.

Example Phishing email. Source: Microsoft

The messages claimed “Donald Trump has published new documents on election fraud”, with the messages including a button to click to view the documents. If the recipient clicks the link in the email, they are directed to the legitimate Constant Contact service, and then redirected to a URL under the control of Nobelium that delivers a malicious ISO file. Within the ISO file are a decoy document, a .lnk shortcut that executes a Cobalt Strike Beacon loader, and a malicious DLL file that is a Cobalt Strike Beacon loader and backdoor dubbed NativeZone by Microsoft.

Once the payloads are deployed, Nobelium gains persistent access to compromised systems and can subsequently complete further objectives such as lateral movement, data exfiltration, and the delivery of additional malware.

A previous campaign in May also used the combination of HTML and ISO files, which dropped a .NET first-stage implant – TrojanDownloader:MSIL/BoomBox – that was used for reconnaissance and to download additional malicious payloads from Dropbox.

The phishing campaign is being investigated by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Constant Contact issued a statement confirming that the account credentials of one of its customers were compromised. “This is an isolated incident, and we have temporarily disabled the impacted accounts while we work in cooperation with our customer, who is working with law enforcement,” said Constant Contact.

Microsoft has warned that the tactics, techniques, and procedures used by Nobelium have had a high rate of evolution. “It is anticipated that additional activity may be carried out by the group using an evolving set of tactics,” warned Microsoft.

Microsoft has published Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) and has suggested several mitigations that can reduce the impact of this threat, including the use of antivirus software, enabling network protection to prevent applications or users from accessing malicious domains, and implementing multi-factor authentication to prevent the use of compromised credentials.

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New Report Provides Deep Dive into COVID-19 Themed Phishing Tactics

In early 2020, phishers started to take advantage of the pandemic and switched from their standard lures to a wide variety of pandemic-related themes for their campaigns. To coincide with the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, researchers at the Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Team analyzed the phishing trends over the course of the past year to review the changes in the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of phishers and the extent to which COVID-19 was used in their phishing campaigns.

The researchers analyzed all phishing URLs detected between January 2020 and February 2021 to determine how many had a COVID-19 theme, using specific keywords and phrases related to COVID-19 and other aspects of the pandemic. The researchers identified 69,950 unique phishing URLs related to COVID-19 topics, with almost half of those URLs directly related to COVID-19.

Phishing campaigns were promptly adapted to the latest news and thoughts on the coronavirus and closely mirrored the latest pandemic trends. Following the World Health Organization’s declaration of the pandemic in March 2020 there was a global shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing kits, and phishing campaigns were launched offering access to stocks. Government stimulus programs were then launched, and phishing campaigns were quickly adapted to include lures related to those programs. For instance, the volume of phishing emails related to COVID-19 online test kits closely followed the popularity of test kit-related searches on Google.

Source: Palo Alto Networks COVID19 Phishing Report

Throughout the pandemic, the websites of genuine vendors of COVID-19 test kits were targeted. Access to the sites was gained and phishing kits were uploaded to steal credentials. In December 2020, when the vaccine rollout started, campaigns switched to vaccine related lures using domains that spoofed vaccine developers such as Pfizer, BioNTech and others. The websites of pharmaceutical companies were targeted and had phishing content added related to vaccines. Between December 2020 and February 2021, vaccine-related phishing scams increased by 530%.

One off the techniques employed by phishers to evade security solutions is to use a two-step process on their phishing websites that requires the visitor to first click to login before being presented with the phishing form – a tactic called client-side cloaking. Many anti-phishing solutions will visit the URL linked in an email to assess the content but will only check the landing page for phishing content. By using client-side cloaking the malicious content is less likely to be detected.

The report highlights the opportunistic nature of phishers. They will rapidly change their TTPs in response to new trends and use lures that are likely to get the best response, including changing targets. Between December 2020 and February 2021, phishing attacks targeting pharmacies and hospitals increased by 189% as phishers switched to targeting healthcare employees to steal their credentials.

Throughout the pandemic, Microsoft was the brand most targeted by attackers. More than 23% of COVID-19 phishing URLS targeted Microsoft credentials. Fake Microsoft login pages were set up to steal the Microsoft 365 credentials of employees at pharmaceutical firms and pharmacies. When Microsoft credentials are obtained, they can be used to access email accounts to send phishing emails from genuine pharmacy and pharma company domains, increasing the chance of those emails being delivered and acted upon by the recipients. Targeted companies include Walgreens in the US, Pharmascience in Canada, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals in India, and Junshi Biosciences in China.

Currently, large numbers of phishing emails are being sent related to vaccines and as more individuals try to get themselves and their family members registered for immunization, vaccine-related phishing scams are likely to continue.

“Individuals should continue to exercise caution when viewing any emails or websites claiming to sell any goods or services or provide any benefits related to COVID-19. If it seems too good to be true, it most likely is,” warned the Unit42 researchers. “Employees in the healthcare industry in particular should view links contained in any incoming emails with suspicion, especially from emails trying to convey a sense of urgency.”

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Free Google Services Abused in Phishing Campaigns

Several phishing campaigns have been identified that are using free Google services to bypass email security gateways and ensure malicious messages are delivered to inboxes.

Phishing emails often include hyperlinks that direct users to websites hosting phishing forms that harvest credentials. Email security gateways use a variety of methods to detect these malicious hyperlinks, including blacklists of known malicious websites, scoring of domains, and visiting the links to analyze the content on the destination website. If the links are determined to be suspicious or malicious, the emails are quarantined or rejected. However, by using links to legitimate Google services, phishers are managing to bypass these security measures and ensure their messages are delivered.

The use of Google services by phishers is nothing new; however, security researchers at Arborblox have identified an uptick in this activity that has coincided with increased adoption of remote working. The researchers identified 5 campaigns abusing free Google services such as Google Forms, Google Drive, Google Sites, and Google Docs.  It is not just Google services that are being abused, as campaigns have been detected that abuse other free cloud services such as Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Webflow, SendGrid, and Amazon Simple Email Service.

One of the campaigns impersonated American Express, with the initial message requesting account validation as the user was found to have missed information when validating their card. The emails direct the user to a phishing page created using Google Forms. The form includes the official American Express logo and a short questionnaire requesting information that can be used by the attackers to gain access to their credit card account – login information, phone number, card number and security code, and security questions and answers.

Since the link in the email directs the user to Google Forms – a legitimate Google domain and service – it is unlikely that an email security gateway would identify the URL as malicious. “Google’s domain is inherently trustworthy and Google forms are used for several legitimate reasons, no email security filter would realistically block this link on day zero,” explained the Armorblox researchers.

Another campaign used Google Forms in a classic phishing lure. The emails appear to have been sent by a childless widow who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She is looking to donate her fortune to good causes, with the recipient of the message told that the widow would like them to make donations to good causes on her behalf. The hyperlink directs the user to an untitled Google Form. Should anyone proceed and submit an answer to the untitled question, they will be shortlisted for further extortion attempts.

A campaign was detected that used a fake email login page hosted on Google’s Firebase mobile platform, which is used to create apps, files, and images. The emails in this campaign impersonate the security team and claim important emails have not been delivered due to the email storage quota being exceeded. The campaign targets email login credentials. The link to the Firebase would be unlikely to be identified as malicious since it is a legitimate cloud storage repository.

Google Docs has also been abused in a campaign in which the payroll team is impersonated, with the Google Docs document containing a link to a phishing page where sensitive information is harvested. Since the initial link is to a legitimate and commonly used Google service, it is unlikely to be blocked by email security solutions. While some email solutions would be able to identify the malicious link in the Google-hosted document, various redirects are used to obfuscate the malicious link.

A campaign was also identified that impersonated the user’s IT department security team and Microsoft Teams, using a fake Microsoft login page hosted on Google Sites. Google Sites is a legitimate service that allows individuals to easily create webpages, but in this case has been used to create a webpage hosting a phishing form, complete with the genuine Microsoft logo.

Campaigns abusing trust in Google Docs have also been identified by researchers at Area 1 Security. The messages in that campaign impersonated the HR department and claimed the recipient had been terminated, with the Google Docs document providing details of the termination and severance pay. The document contains a malicious macro that, if allowed to run, will download the Bazar Backdoor and Buer loader malware. IRONSCALES also recently reported that around half of all sophisticated phishing campaigns were successfully bypassing the leading email security gateways.

The campaigns range from highly targeted attacks on specific groups of individuals, such as HR and payroll departments, to untargeted large-scale ‘spray and pray’ campaigns to obtain as many credentials as possible, using more general lures.

These campaigns highlight the need for advanced security solutions that are capable of identifying and blocking phishing emails that abuse legitimate cloud services and the need for ongoing security awareness training for employees to help them identify phishing emails that evade detection by their organization’s cybersecurity defenses.

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Phishing Incidents Reported by Connecticut Department of Social Services, Mercy Iowa City and LSU Care Services

Connecticut Department of Social Services (DSS) has reported a potential breach of the protected health information of 37,000 individuals as a result of a series of phishing attacks that occurred between July and December 2019.

Several email accounts were compromised and were used to send spam emails to several DSS employees, the investigation of which confirmed the phishing attacks. A comprehensive investigation was conducted using state information technology resources and a third-party forensic IT firm, but no evidence was found to indicate the attackers had accessed patient information in the email accounts. According to the DSS breach notice, “Due to the large volume of emails involved and the nature of the phishing attack, the forensic efforts could not determine with certainty that the hackers did not access personal information.”

Identity theft protection services have been offered to affected individuals as a precaution and steps have been taken to improve email security and better protect against phishing attacks in the future.

More Than 92,000 Individuals Affected by Mercy Iowa City Phishing Attack

Mercy Iowa City has started notifying 92,795 individuals that some of their protected health information was potentially compromised in a phishing attack. The attack involved a single email account which was accessed by an unauthorized individual between May 15, 2020 and June 24, 2020. The email account was used to send spam and phishing emails.

A review of the compromised account revealed it contained names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, treatment information, and health insurance information. Individuals whose driver’s license number or Social Security number were potentially compromised have been offered complimentary credent monitoring services for 12 months.

Mercy Iowa City has implemented additional safeguards to prevent further attacks, including multi-factor authentication on email accounts.

LSU Health Care Services Suffers Phishing Attack

The Louisiana State University (LSU) Health New Orleans Health Care Services Division has announced that an unauthorized individual has accessed the email account of an employee and potentially viewed or obtained the information of patients of several hospitals in Louisiana.

The email account was breached on September 15, 2020. The attack was discovered on September 18 and the email account was immediately disabled. An investigation was launched but no evidence was found to indicate patient information in the emails and attachments was accessed or obtained by the individual responsible.

A review of the breached email account revealed it contained the protected health information of patients of the following hospitals:

  • University Medical Center in Lafayette
  • Lallie Kemp Regional Medical Center in Independence
  • Leonard J. Chabert Medical Center in Houma
  • O. Moss Regional Medical Center in Lake Charles
  • Bogalusa Medical Center in Bogalusa
  • Interim LSU Hospital in New Orleans.
  • Earl K. Long Medical Center in Baton Rouge

The types of information potentially compromised varied from patient to patient and medical center to medical center, but may have included names, phone numbers, addresses, medical record numbers, account numbers, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, dates of service, types of services received, insurance ID numbers, and a limited number of financial account information and health information. The investigation into the breach is continuing, but so far “thousands” of patients are known to have had their information exposed.

LSU Health is currently evaluating additional security measures to better protect against further attacks and additional information security training has been provided to employees.

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Microsoft Warns of Ongoing Sophisticated Phishing Campaign Targeting Office 365 Users

Office 365 users have been warned about an ongoing phishing campaign which harvests user credentials. The campaign uses sophisticated techniques to bypass email security gateways and social engineering tactics to fool company employees into visiting websites where credentials are harvested.

A variety of lures are used in the phishing emails which target remote workers, such as fake password update requests, information on teleconferencing, SharePoint notifications, and helpdesk tickets. The lures are plausible and the websites to which Office 365 users are directed are realistic and convincing, complete with replicated logos and color schemes.

The threat actors have used a range of techniques to bypass secure email gateways to ensure the messages are delivered to inboxes. These include redirector URLs that can detect sandbox environments and will direct real users to the phishing websites and security solutions to benign websites, to prevent analysis. The emails also incorporate heavy obfuscation in the HTML code.

Microsoft notes that the redirector sites have a unique subdomain that includes a username and the targeted organization’s domain name to add realism to the campaign. The phishing URLs have an extra dot after the top-level domain, after which is the Base64 encoded email address of the recipient. The phishing URLs are often added to compromised websites, rather than used on attacker owned domains. Since many different subdomains are used, it is possible to send large volumes of phishing emails and evade security solutions.

Office 365 credentials are highly sought after. Email accounts can be accessed and used for further phishing attacks, business email compromise scams, and the accounts often contain a wealth of sensitive data, including protected health information. Once an attacker has access to the Office 365 environment, they can access sensitive stored documents, and conduct further attacks on the organization.

Microsoft explained that Microsoft 365 Defender for Office 365 can detect phishing emails in this campaign and resolve attacks, but a recent study by IRONSCALES has shown that many email security gateways fail to block these sophisticated phishing threats.

The Israel-based security firm recently published data from a test of the leading secure email gateways and found they failed to block around half of advanced phishing attempts, including spear phishing and social engineering attacks. The company used its Emulator to test the effectiveness of five of the top secure email gateways, including Microsoft’s Advanced Threat Protection (APT), and simulated real-world phishing scenarios to see how each performed.

For the tests, IRONSCALES conducted 162 emulations (16,200 emails) against the top 5 secure email gateways and found 47% of the emails were delivered to inboxes – 7,614 emails.  The penetration rate – the percentage of emails that bypassed the secure email gateways – ranged from 35% to 55% across the 5 tested security solutions.

The leading secure email gateways were effective at blocking emails containing malicious attachments, with only 4% being delivered to inboxes, and just 3% of emails containing links to malicious files were delivered. However, they were far less effective at blocking social engineering and email impersonation attacks, which accounted for 30% of all successfully delivered emails. Domain name impersonations accounted for 25% of the delivered emails. These emails linked to a domain name that had the right records set in the DNS. Emails containing links to URLs containing fake login pages were delivered 16% of the time.

The tests highlighted the need for AI-driven security solutions that have natural language understanding and the importance of providing security awareness training to the workforce, as many of these advanced phishing threats will reach end user inboxes.

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Phishing Campaign Uses Employment Termination Lure to Deliver Bazar and Buer Malware

A new phishing campaign is being conducted using the TrickBot botnet which delivers the Bazar backdoor and Buer loader malware. The campaign was detected by researchers at Area 1 Security and has been running since early October.

The Bazar backdoor is used to gain persistent access to victims’ networks, while the Buer loader is used to download additional malicious payloads. Previously, Buer has been used to deliver ransomware payloads such as Ryuk and tools such as CobaltStrike.

Area 1 Security researchers detected two email lures in this campaign. One is a fake notification about termination of employment and the other a fake customer compliant. The employment termination email appears to have been sent by an authority figure in the head office of the company being targeted and states that the individual has been terminated. Further information on the termination and payout are provided in a document that appears to be hosted on Google Docs.

If the link is clicked, the user will be directed to a Google Doc decoy preview page and is advised to click another link if they are not redirected. That link directs them to a URL where a file download is initiated. The user will be presented with a security warning asking if they want to run the file. Doing so launches a PE32+ executable on Windows systems and triggers a sequence of events that results in the download of either the Buer loader or the Bazar backdoor. Constant Contact links are also being used in this campaign.

The use of cloud services for hosting malicious documents is now commonplace. It is a tactic used to bypass security solutions that scan attached files for malicious code such as macros. By linking to legitimate cloud services, some security solutions will fail to detect the link as malicious and will deliver the emails to users’ inboxes. Should the links in the emails be classified as malicious by URL scanning security solutions, the attackers can simply switch to different URLs.

Last month Microsoft announced a takedown operation that saw it take control of the infrastructure used by the operators of TrickBot. This major operation was only temporarily effective at disrupting the botnet infrastructure. Microsoft said the takedown operation was only likely to be temporary, as the TrickBot operators would likely rebuild their operation on different infrastructure.

Area 1 Security researchers note that this campaign resumed after just two days after the takedown of the botnet and, this time around, the TrickBot gang is using sinkhole resistant EmerDNS TLDs, which make any further takedown attempts difficult.

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Office 365 Users Targeted in Microsoft Teams Phishing Scam

A new Office 365 phishing campaign has been detected by researchers at Abnormal Security that spoofs Microsoft Teams to trick users into visiting a malicious website hosting a phishing form that harvests Office 365 credentials.

Microsoft Teams has been adopted by many organizations to allow remote workers to maintain contact with the office. In healthcare the platform is being used to provide telehealth services to help reduce the numbers of patients visiting healthcare facilities to control the spread of COVID-19.

Microsoft reported in in a June call announcing financial earnings for the quarter ended June 30, 2020 that Microsoft Teams is now used by more than 150 million students and teachers. More than 1,800 organizations have more than 10,000 Teams users, and 69 organizations have more than 100,000 users. The use of Microsoft Teams in healthcare has also been growing, with 46 million Teams meetings now being conducted for telehealth purposes. The increase in usage due to the pandemic has presented an opportunity for cybercriminals.

According to figures from Abnormal Security, the latest campaign has seen the fake Microsoft Teams emails sent to up to 50,000 Office 365 users so far. The messages appear to be sent from a user with the display name “There’s new activity in Teams,” making the messages appear to be automated notifications from Teams.

The messages advise users to login as the Team community is trying to get in touch. The emails include a button to click to login to Teams that has the display text – “Reply in Teams.” The messages include a realistic looking footer with the Microsoft logo and options to install Microsoft Teams on iOS and Android.

The links in the email direct the user to a Microsoft login page that is a carbon copy of the official login prompt, aside from the domain on which the page is hosted. That domain starts with microsftteams to make it appear genuine.

The campaign is one of many targeting Office 365 credentials and there have been several campaigns targeting videoconferening platforms in response to the increase in popularity of the solutions during the pandemic.

Emotet Trojan Campaign Uses Fake Microsoft Word Upgrade Notifications

The Emotet Trojan is being spread in a new campaign that uses fake Microsoft Word upgrade notifications as a lure to get users to install the malware. Emotet is the most widely distributed malware currently in use. Infection with the malware sees the user’s device added to a botnet that is used to infect other devices. Emotet is also a malware downloader and is used to install information stealers such as TrickBot and QBot malware, which are used to deliver ransomware variants such as Ryuk, ProLock, and Conti.

The messages appear to be Microsoft Office notifications that advise the user that they need to perform an upgrade of Microsoft Word to add new features. The messages have a Microsoft Word attachment and the user is instructed to Enable Editing and then Enable Content. Doing so will launch a malicious macro which will download Emotet onto the user’s device

Users should exercise caution and should avoid clicking links or opening attachments in unsolicited emails. Since Emotet hijacks the user’s email account to send further phishing emails, the messages may even be sent from an individual in the user’s contact list.

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