Re: Recent Phishing Uptick

[Gary Warner <gar () CIS UAB EDU>]

Bob, 

Your "Modify the spam before delivering" trick is awesome!  Which mailsystem are you using, and can you share a bit 
more about your technique?

Thanks!

----------------------------------------------------------

Gary Warner
Director of Research in Computer Forensics
The University of Alabama at Birmingham
Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research
205.422.2113
gar () cis uab edu

-----------------------------------------------------------

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Bayn" <bob.bayn () USU EDU>
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 8:53:14 PM
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Recent Phishing Uptick


Speaking of phishing forms on the free hosting sites We watch for a couple dozen of those hostnames in email messages 
and add this warning at the top of the message before delivering it: 



Warning: Do not enter your USU A-Number and password on any web form linked from this email message. This warning has 
been inserted here by Utah State University's IronPort Spam Filter System. 
The USU spam filter has detected in the message below a link to a web form hosting service ( link ) that is SOMETIMES 
used by "phishers" to get your email address and password for their use. You must decide if the link might serve some 
other legitimate purpose that is important to you. Thanks for being an Internet Skeptic! 

For information about why this warning was added to this message see: 
https://it.usu.edu/computer-security/be-an-internet-skeptic/form-services/ 

==== ORIGINAL MESSAGE BEGINS BELOW THIS LINE ==== 
and I get a Bcc: of the message and report the link to the hosting site. Some hosts are very prompt (minutes) about 
disabling the form while others can take a day or more. 




Bob Bayn SER 301 (435)797-2396 IT Security Team 
Office of Information Technology, Utah State University 
Do you know the "Skeptical Hover Technique" and 
how to tell where a web link really goes? See: 
https://it.usu.edu/computer-security/computer-security-threats/articleID=23737 




From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] on behalf of David Curry 
[david.curry () NEWSCHOOL EDU] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 6:15 PM 
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU 
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Recent Phishing Uptick 






We are also a Google Apps school. Starting in mid-November and increasing until now it's occurring two or three times a 
week, users in our domain have been receiving phishing emails sent by other user accounts within our domain. The 
attempts are all pretty rudimentary: "your email is over quota," "security upgrades mean you need to confirm your 
information," etc. with a link to a form on some free web hosting site (yolasite or other). No logos or other 
trickiness, just plain text written by folks with varying degrees of English proficiency. The content is not what has 
us concerned, the volume is. We've had nearly two dozen of them (different senders) since the first of this year. 


What's been confusing us is that every single one of these appears to have been sent directly from Google, i.e., the 
sender was logged into the Gmail account. They were not sent from outside our domain, or dumped in via some open relay. 
This seems to be confirmed by the fact that, with two exceptions, each compromised account has sent one, and only one 
phishing email--we're guessing this is because as soon as we receive a phishing email, we try to contact the owner of 
the account and have him/her change his/her password. The only two exceptions were people we were not able to contact 
quickly. Sometimes Google beats us to it and disables the accounts for sending spam, but not always. 


Just this week, I started looking at the Google Admin Reporting SDK, which lets you retrieve, among other things, a 
login history for an account, including IP address, AND, whether or not Google called it a "suspicious" login. It's not 
completely clear what "suspicious" means, but it seems they will flag it if you login from an unfamiliar IP range, or 
two widely separated geographic areas in a short time. If you'd like to try this on your domain: 


    1. Sign in to your domain with an account that has Super Admin privileges 
    2. Enable the Admin Reporting API on your domain if you haven't already 
    3. Visit Google's API Explorer ( https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/#p/admin/reports_v1/ ) 
    4. Click on "reports.activities.list" 
    5. At the top right of the page, click the "off" switch to "on" to authenticate via OAuth2.0 
    6. Put a user email address in the 'userKey' field (e.g., user () yourdomain edu ) 
    7. Put 'login' in the 'applicationName' field 
    8. Click 'Execute' 

Now you can use your browser search function to look for the word "suspicious", or just browse through the output 
looking for interesting things. I did this yesterday for four or five of our accounts that had sent phishing emails 
recently, and found some interesting things: 


    * For all but one of the accounts, Google had identified a "suspicious" login. All of these came from Nigeria -- 
two different ISPs there. 
    * For the one account that didn't have a suspicious login, the account was clearly "owned" by the bad guys; ALL the 
logins for the past few months came from Nigeria and the UK (my guess is that the "suspicious" login occurred so long 
ago it's no longer in the history). 
    * The "suspicious" login occurred at least two weeks before the account was used to send the phishing email. There 
was one exception where it occurred a couple of days before. 
    * In most cases, the accounts seemed to get logged into multiple times between the first suspicious login and the 
sending of the phishing email. 
    * Once the user changed his/her password, the unauthorized logins stopped. 

The above was all a terribly manual process--look up the data in API Explorer, manually read through JSON-formatted 
output, look IPs up in geolocation and ASN databases, etc. My new project is putting together an automated version of 
the steps above to dig up information about these accounts. I'm hoping that the accounts all exhibit the same 
characteristics, which might mean a script that runs nightly looking for suspicious logins from suspicious locations 
(e.g., Nigeria) can be developed and we can, maybe, start taking some proactive action. 


One thing that still has us puzzled, though, is how all these accounts got (or are getting) compromised. Is it just 
users responding to phishing emails and filling out the forms? Or was it some major event (the Adobe compromise comes 
to mind from a timing standpoint, but we have no evidence to suggest it had anything to do with this)? 


Sorry for the length of this response. But honestly, I'm a little relived to hear that someone else is having the same 
(or similar) problem, and it's not just us. 


--Dave 









-- 

DAVID A. CURRY, CISSP • DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION SECURITY 

THE NEW SCHOOL • 55 W. 13TH STREET • NEW YORK, NY 10011 

+1 212 229-5300 x4728 • david.curry () newschool edu 




On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 6:15 PM, Peter Setlak < psetlak () colgate edu > wrote: 



Over the past few weeks we saw a dramatic increase in the level and sophistication of phishing against our domain. The 
phishers not only used compromised accounts from other Universities but from our own as well. They also copied some 
images from our main website as well as screen-scraped our accounts-reset page. 


There seem to have been two different campaigns going; one more sophisticated than the other. 


They only sent emails at night or early morning, none were sent to my inbox (security admin). 


We use Google Apps and of course, they were of no real help. 


I was able to track down the logins from an IP range owned by Spotflux VPN services ( spotflux.com ). The IP range was 
162.210.196.160-175. 


We also saw logins from a Nigerian IP range (41.203.69.x). 


After contacting their support, one of their techs was able to correlate some information and found 142 different 
machines in the Nigerian IP range was using their VPN service. He null-routed them and it has been a few hours but we 
have not seen any logins since. 


Has anyone else seen this uptick in phishing? 
Has anyone else seen these IP ranges knocking at their doors? 
Has anyone else seen this scenario before? 
Does anyone have suggestions for working with Google to get better reporting and options? 


I would really like to see the ability to do two things through Google: 


1. Deny certain IP ranges from successfully authenticating into our domain. Obviously, Google has to allow all users 
from anywhere use their services; if I could set our App domain to automatically log someone out if they logged-in from 
a certain IP range, that would be very helpful. We have no students in Nigeria (currently). 


2. Pull an email from users' inboxes before they respond. In this case, perhaps the first 15 users in my domain might 
see and click on the email - hopefully at least one sends it to ITS. Then, we could pull that email from the remaining 
users' inboxes before they ever get a chance to open it. 


Perhaps there is something Google offers or a Google-integrated third-party offers that would allow me to do this? 


-- 

Thank you, 

Peter J. Setlak 
Network Security Analyst, GSEC, GLEG, GCPM 
Colgate University 
--- 
psetlak () colgate edu 
(315) 228-7151 
Case-Geyer 450 
skype: petersetlak 

Think Green! Please consider the environment before printing this email. 



Engage with Colgate University: 

News blog , Twitter , Facebook , Google+ , Delicious , YouTube , Flickr , Pinterest , LinkedIn