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 to...
Wire Attack While the SWIFT network has experienced fewer attacks since its infamous 2016 bank heist, cybercriminals are readily using wire transfers in new and creative ways to launch malicious, if not lucrative and creative cyber assaults. In one high-profile example in 2018, Frank Krasovec, an owner of Domino’s Pizza franchises in China, lost $450,000 when a fraudster intercepted his email and convinced his assistant to wire money to Hong Kong on two occasions. More recently in 2020, attackers targeted a bank manager in Hong Kong with a call that impersonated the voice of a director he knew via AI voice cloning technology. The cybercriminal impersonating the executive claimed his company was making an acquisition and requested that $35 million in funds be wired electronically to another account. Usually initiated with a phishing attack or malware, wire transfer attacks provide the vehicle for transferring copious sums of money quickly. What you need to know: Wire attacks ...
DNS Hijacking On a Thursday morning in 2017, WikiLeaks readers woke up expecting to find the latest state secret released on the whistleblowing website, only to discover a message from a hacker collective called OurMine announcing that they were in control of the domain. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange quickly took to Twitter to clarify that the takedown was not a traditional hack, but instead a domain name system (DNS) attack. What you need to know: DNS is often called the Achilles heel of the internet, or the internet’s phonebook, because it plays a critical role in routing web traffic. The DNS is the protocol used to map domain names to IP addresses. It has been proven to work well for its intended function. But DNS is notoriously vulnerable to attack, attributed in part to its distributed nature. DNS relies on unstructured connections between millions of clients and servers over inherently insecure protocols. The gravity and extent of the importance of securing DNS fro...
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