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 firms. These assaults goal to steal worker credentials and breach firm cyber safety defences.
Ryan Economos, APAC subject chief know-how officer at electronic mail safety agency Mimecast, advised TechRepublic that such phishing assaults are uncommon of their use of Atlassian as a canopy. However he famous that phishing assaults have gotten more and more refined, because of 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 staff. The phishing assaults:
- Leveraged in style native model Atlassian’s workspaces, in addition to different unified workspace platforms, together with Archbee and Nuclino, to ship staff dangerous emails that appeared acquainted and legit.
- Used machine compliance updates as a canopy, instructing staff by way of electronic mail that they wanted to replace their units to stay compliant with firm coverage.
- Have been designed to redirect those that clicked the hyperlink to a pretend firm portal, the place attackers might harvest credentials and different delicate info.
- Embedded the phishing hyperlink in an electronic mail despatched from addresses related to Japanese ISPs.
“There’s numerous personalisation within the emails similar to particulars of a ‘machine’ and a number of other references to the corporate area they’re sending these campaigns to extend validity,” Mimecast’s report mentioned.
SEE: Australia’s legal profession is rushing to adopt AI
“The sender deal with identify all the time refers back to the goal organisation’s area identify with the goal of fooling finish customers into pondering it’s from their inside division.”
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 features 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 improvement for the market.
“Mimecast continues to see risk actors making use of companies similar to OneDrive and Google Docs to host recordsdata or hyperlinks of their campaigns, however using workspaces similar to Atlassian has not been closely abused beforehand,” he mentioned.
A part of the marketing campaign was an electronic mail that seemed to be from Atlassian’s Confluence product. Mimecast referred to a “noticeable enhance in using Atlassian” to evade detection in current occasions.
“Abuse of official companies is an ongoing and evolving problem,” Economos mentioned. “Attackers will proceed to leverage respected sources to launch and host their campaigns, in an try and evade detection.”
SEE: The alarming state of data breaches in Australia in 2024
Harvesting of tracker information intelligence
The marketing campaign used postmark URLs to redirect customers to the unified workspace options. Postmark URLs permit attackers to assemble information similar to 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.
A number of URL obfuscation strategies
Making it harder for customers to establish the true vacation spot of the URL, the phishing marketing campaign used “a number of obfuscation strategies,” Mimecast mentioned. This consists of a number of redirections throughout the URL, encoded characters, and the insertion of monitoring parameters.
Enlisting unsuspecting Japanese ISPs
Though using Japanese ISPs isn’t distinctive to this phishing marketing campaign, Economos famous that they have been exploited as soon as once more, as they’d in a number of earlier assaults.
“It continues to show the lengths that risk actors will go to in an effort to efficiently generate assaults on organisations,” he commented.
Phishing assaults will get simpler to mount — and extra convincing
Phishing remains to be among the many commonest cyber threats amongst organisations, Economos mentioned.
Generative AI and machine studying, whereas additionally serving to defenders cease assaults, is anticipated to extend the sophistication and enhance the focusing on and content material of phishing campaigns. This may drive defenders’ must detect and shortly reply to new and novel assault strategies.
SEE: APAC employees are choosing convenience over cyber security
“The most important evolution has been the speed and accuracy of phishing threats, by way of using phishing kits, automation, and AI-based applied sciences,” Economos mentioned. “These platforms permit even low-skill-level attackers to launch large-scale campaigns and a capability to shortly craft extra convincing phishing emails to evade detection by conventional safety instruments.”
Economos additionally famous the rise of pretexting — the place a cyber legal will analysis and pose as a personality to offer a convincing story or “pretext” to trick the phishing sufferer — in addition to Enterprise Electronic mail Compromise, as important elements within the evolution within the phishing risk panorama.
“As our work surfaces proceed to diversify, risk actors are diversifying the vectors they exploit past electronic mail, focusing on social media platforms, collaboration instruments like Microsoft Groups, Slack, and OneDrive proper by way of to vishing and smishing assaults utilizing telephone calls or textual content messages to deceive victims,” he mentioned.
