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Enterprises throughout Australia and the APAC area have been warned that cyber criminals are exploiting in style platforms like Atlassian to launch extra convincing phishing assaults on legislation corporations and different companies. These assaults purpose to steal worker credentials and breach firm cyber safety defences.
Ryan Economos, APAC subject chief expertise officer at e mail safety agency Mimecast, advised TechRepublic that such phishing assaults are uncommon of their use of Atlassian as a canopy. But he famous that phishing assaults have gotten more and more refined, 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 Global Threat Intelligence Report 2024 H1 reported on the emergence of a brand new phishing tactic that used a compliance replace cowl story to focus on legislation agency workers. The phishing assaults:
- Leveraged in style native model Atlassian’s workspaces, as nicely as different unified workspace platforms, together with Archbee and Nuclino, to ship workers dangerous emails that appeared acquainted and legit.
- Used machine compliance updates as a canopy, instructing workers through e mail that they wanted to replace their units to stay compliant with firm coverage.
- Were designed to redirect those that clicked the hyperlink to a faux firm portal, the place attackers might harvest credentials and different delicate info.
- Embedded the phishing hyperlink in an e mail despatched from addresses related to Japanese ISPs.
“There’s quite a lot of personalisation in the emails such as details of a ‘device’ and several references to the company domain they are sending these campaigns to increase validity,” Mimecast’s report mentioned.
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“The sender address name always refers to the target organisation’s domain name with the aim of fooling end users into thinking it is from their internal department.”
The rising sophistication of phishing assaults
Economos famous that whereas the marketing campaign initially focused Australian legislation corporations, it has since expanded to different industries and is now not confined to the authorized sector. He highlighted a number of facets of the marketing campaign that point out growing sophistication amongst risk actors.
Use of Atlassian and different workspaces
Economos mentioned the rising use of Atlassian workspaces was a more recent growth for the market.
“Mimecast continues to see threat actors making use of services such as OneDrive and Google Docs to host files or links in their campaigns, but the use of workspaces such as Atlassian has not been heavily abused previously,” he mentioned.
Part of the marketing campaign was an e mail that gave the impression to be from Atlassian’s Confluence product. Mimecast referred to a “noticeable increase in the use of Atlassian” to evade detection in current instances.
“Abuse of legitimate services is an ongoing and evolving challenge,” Economos mentioned. “Attackers will continue to leverage reputable sources to launch and host their campaigns, in an attempt to evade detection.”
SEE: The alarming state of information breaches in Australia in 2024
Harvesting of tracker knowledge intelligence
The marketing campaign used postmark URLs to redirect customers to the unified workspace options. Postmark URLs permit attackers to collect knowledge such as 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.
Multiple URL obfuscation methods
Making it tougher for customers to determine the true vacation spot of the URL, the phishing marketing campaign used “multiple obfuscation techniques,” Mimecast mentioned. This consists of a number of redirections throughout the URL, encoded characters, and the insertion of monitoring parameters.
Enlisting unsuspecting Japanese ISPs
Although using Japanese ISPs is just not distinctive to this phishing marketing campaign, Economos famous that they had been exploited as soon as once more, as that they had in a number of earlier assaults.
“It continues to expose the lengths that threat actors will go to in order to successfully generate attacks on organisations,” he commented.
Phishing assaults will get simpler to mount — and extra convincing
Phishing continues to be among the many most typical cyber threats amongst organisations, Economos mentioned.
Generative AI and machine studying, whereas additionally serving to defenders cease assaults, is predicted to extend the sophistication and enhance the focusing on and content material of phishing campaigns. This will drive defenders’ must detect and rapidly reply to new and novel assault methods.
SEE: APAC workers are selecting comfort over cyber safety
“The biggest evolution has been the velocity and accuracy of phishing threats, through the use of phishing kits, automation, and AI-based technologies,” Economos mentioned. “These platforms allow even low-skill-level attackers to launch large-scale campaigns and an ability to quickly craft more convincing phishing emails to evade detection by traditional security tools.”
Economos additionally famous the rise of pretexting — the place a cyber prison will analysis and pose as a personality to offer a convincing story or “pretext” to trick the phishing sufferer — as nicely as Business Email Compromise, as vital elements within the evolution within the phishing risk panorama.
“As our work surfaces continue to diversify, threat actors are diversifying the vectors they exploit beyond email, targeting social media platforms, collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and OneDrive right through to vishing and smishing attacks using phone calls or text messages to deceive victims,” he mentioned.
