Oh, if clicks were wishes. After decades of extended car warranty negotiations and speed dates with Nigerian princes, nearly all organizations remain keenly aware phishing attacks are part of doing business. We’re all human, but it’s the forehead slap moments that seem to sting the most. Maintaining that vigilance while your inbox explodes on a Friday afternoon is no small challenge. We’ve all been there, and the bad guys know it. We don’t get to share too many of them, so sit back and enjoy a few war stories our team has been a part of. While no actual employees were harmed in the making of this story, they quickly learned that class was in session.
As with many other social engineering engagements, we created a phish based on a spoofed login portal. The assessment scope allowed our engineer to pivot off any harvested credentials. So, with that as the focus, he leapt at the first set that came in. Glee quickly faded as he found the organization enforced MFA through a push notification. Thinking the gig was up, our tester stepped away in search of commiseration coffee. Bingo! When he returned the user had approved the MFA push.
The best advice for outsmarting a professional phisherman is to confirm a communication’s legitimacy with the person or organization that allegedly sent it. But what about the phish within the phish? For this, our team created a complex phishing email claiming to be from our customer’s own IT department. Using company branding and styles found on publicly available customer sites, the branded email urged users to login to their email, using a link provided in the email of course, to re-authenticate after an upgrade. You guessed it, this link was for a phishing site that stole the entered credentials and then redirected, smoke and mirrors style, to an error page. Here’s where the darkness became all encompassing. Both the email and the error page provided a number to contact IT for help. Not only did employees enter credentials, but the phone started ringing. Grateful to have the call answered quickly by a friendly person, several of these people told our tester other sites where those credentials should work and provided info that helped our tester login. Trust and rapport were inferred because the employees made the call to the phisher instead of the other way around.