Use Case: Credential Phishing

Watch the video to see a real credential phishing attack detected by Abnormal.

Let's take a look at an example that we, and likely you, are seeing quite frequently: credential phishing attacks. As a reminder, all the attacks that you see within our environment are real attacks with the customer data anonymized.

In this attack example, we see an email that looks to be coming from Zoom, stating to our recipient that they've missed a scheduled Zoom meeting. For their convenience, there is a quick link for them to click on to join that meeting that's in progress.

If we take a closer look at the sender, we see that the sender name is Zoom Meeting, but the actual sender email is coming from this pkf[.]com, a likely compromised domain and sender here. Since this is appearing to be a legitimate domain, it is likely going to pass all of the traditional sender authentication methods like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

We see that there are no attachments in this email, but there is one link. In this case, the threat actor created the link with a different display text and destination URL. So the display text appears to be this legitimate zoom[.]app URL, but where the recipient actually would've been taken is to this app[.]link URL. Now, app[.]link is a legitimate service that's going to pass your threat intelligence lookups, but it can be used to redirect or even host malicious content.

All of these indicators combined make this a very difficult or near impossible attack for traditional security email security providers to detect. So how is Abnormal able to uniquely detect this attack?

First of all, we see that this is an unusual sender. The sender is using language that's attempting to engage, but we've never seen this email address zoommeeting@pkf[.]com sending to our organization. Next, we see some abnormal content in this email in the actual HTML. We're seeing some text and spaces with zero size, meaning that there are some zero-font text or zero-width spaces within this email. This is a very common way for threat actors to obfuscate and change what the scanning technologies are using to detect these attacks.

Next, we see this unusual IP geolocation. In this case, we've seen emails from pkf.com but never being sent from Bulgaria. And lastly, we see this suspicious link. I showed you that the display text of this URL did not match the destination URL, which is a huge indicator for us.

Based on all of these indicators, we are able to accurately identify this email to be credential phishing. We would automatically remediate this so it's never accessible to the end user.

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