Application Access Token

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 Application Access Token 

Pawn Storm, an active and aggressive espionage group, uses different strategies to gain information from their targets. One method in particular was to abuse Open Authentication (OAuth) in advanced social engineering schemes, targeting high profile users of free webmail. The group also set up aggressive credential phishing attacks against the Democratic National Convention (DNC), the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), the parliament and government of Turkey, the parliament of Montenegro, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Al Jazeera and many other organizations. They continue to use several malicious applications that abuse OAuth access tokens to gain access to target email accounts, including Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

What you need to know: 

With an OAuth access token, a hacker can use the user-granted REST API to perform functions such as email searching and contact enumeration. With a cloud-based email service, once an OAuth access token is granted to a malicious application, it can potentially gain long-term access to features of the user account if a “refresh” token enabling background access is awarded.


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