Search This Blog

Powered by Blogger.

Blog Archive

Labels

Showing posts with label SSL certificate.. Show all posts

Phishing Attacks on Microsoft and Outlook; By Way of Microsoft’s Azure Blob Storage




Two major phishing campaigns have been discovered by the researchers which uses Microsoft’s Azure blob to steal details from Outlook and Microsoft accounts.


Both the campaigns employ real-looking landing pages which make use of SSL certificates and the windows.net domain to seem authentic.

The first phishing email goes around asking the receivers to log into their office 365 account to update the information.

The emails happened to have “Action Required: (email address) information is outdated-Re-validate now!!” in their subject boxes.

The moment a user clicks on the link provided in the mail, they will be directed to a landing page which fake-acts as the organization’s Outlook Web App.

This landing page is what does the main task of stealing the credentials from the user.

The second one works on stealing users’ Microsoft account details and credentials.

The process to lure in the user starts from Facebook’s workplace service and ends up taking the user to a Microsoft’s landing page.

This could either be s single-sign-on approach or a mixed up campaign for luring victims in.

The Microsoft account the users are brought to, is fairly legit looking as it uses the same form and the same background for that matter.

Both the landing pages make use of Azure Blog Storage to make them look convincing and as far as possible, legitimate.

All Microsoft Azure does is that is adds legitimacy to the landing pages used by the phishing-cons to target the Microsoft services.

The Azure Blob storage URLs use the windows.net domain making the landings look fairly legitimate.

One of the phishing links which is not in use anymore had the URL-  https://1drive6e1lj8tcmteh5m.z6.web.core.windows.net/ and the domain name seemed to do the trick.

Also, every URL on Azure Blob Storage happens to be using a wildcard SSL certificate from Microsoft, making every landing page get a “lock symbol”.

This would exhibit a Microsoft certificate every time a user would try to click on the certificate to check who signed, making the entire sham all the more believable.

To steer clear of such phishing attack one thing need to be kept in mind that the original login forms from Outlook and Microsoft could indubitably have outlook.com, live.com, and Microsoft.com as their domain names.