Re: Recent Phishing Uptick

[David Curry <david.curry () NEWSCHOOL EDU>]

We are also a Google Apps school. Starting in mid-November and increasing
until now it's occurring two or three times a week, users in our domain
have been receiving phishing emails sent by other user accounts within our
domain. The attempts are all pretty rudimentary: "your email is over
quota," "security upgrades mean you need to confirm your information," etc.
with a link to a form on some free web hosting site (yolasite or other). No
logos or other trickiness, just plain text written by folks with varying
degrees of English proficiency. The content is not what has us concerned,
the volume is. We've had nearly two dozen of them (different senders) since
the first of this year.

What's been confusing us is that every single one of these appears to have
been sent directly from Google, i.e., the sender was logged into the Gmail
account. They were not sent from outside our domain, or dumped in via some
open relay. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that, with two
exceptions, each compromised account has sent one, and only one phishing
email--we're guessing this is because as soon as we receive a phishing
email, we try to contact the owner of the account and have him/her change
his/her password. The only two exceptions were people we were not able to
contact quickly. Sometimes Google beats us to it and disables the accounts
for sending spam, but not always.

Just this week, I started looking at the Google Admin Reporting SDK, which
lets you retrieve, among other things, a login history for an account,
including IP address, AND, whether or not Google called it a "suspicious"
login. It's not completely clear what "suspicious" means, but it seems they
will flag it if you login from an unfamiliar IP range, or two widely
separated geographic areas in a short time. If you'd like to try this on
your domain:

   1. Sign in to your domain with an account that has Super Admin privileges
   2. Enable the Admin Reporting API on your domain if you haven't already
   3. Visit Google's API Explorer (
   https://developers.google.com/apis-explorer/#p/admin/reports_v1/)
   4. Click on "reports.activities.list"
   5. At the top right of the page, click the "off" switch to "on" to
   authenticate via OAuth2.0
   6. Put a user email address in the 'userKey' field (e.g.,
   user () yourdomain edu)
   7. Put 'login' in the 'applicationName' field
   8. Click 'Execute'

Now you can use your browser search function to look for the word
"suspicious", or just browse through the output looking for interesting
things. I did this yesterday for four or five of our accounts that had sent
phishing emails recently, and found some interesting things:

   - For all but one of the accounts, Google had identified a "suspicious"
   login. All of these came from Nigeria -- two different ISPs there.
   - For the one account that didn't have a suspicious login, the account
   was clearly "owned" by the bad guys; ALL the logins for the past few months
   came from Nigeria and the UK (my guess is that the "suspicious" login
   occurred so long ago it's no longer in the history).
   - The "suspicious" login occurred at least two weeks before the account
   was used to send the phishing email. There was one exception where it
   occurred a couple of days before.
   - In most cases, the accounts seemed to get logged into multiple times
   between the first suspicious login and the sending of the phishing email.
   - Once the user changed his/her password, the unauthorized logins
   stopped.

The above was all a terribly manual process--look up the data in API
Explorer, manually read through JSON-formatted output, look IPs up in
geolocation and ASN databases, etc. My new project is putting together an
automated version of the steps above to dig up information about these
accounts. I'm hoping that the accounts all exhibit the same
characteristics, which might mean a script that runs nightly looking for
suspicious logins from suspicious locations (e.g., Nigeria) can be
developed and we can, maybe, start taking some proactive action.

One thing that still has us puzzled, though, is how all these accounts got
(or are getting) compromised. Is it just users responding to phishing
emails and filling out the forms? Or was it some major event (the Adobe
compromise comes to mind from a timing standpoint, but we have no evidence
to suggest it had anything to do with this)?

Sorry for the length of this response. But honestly, I'm a little relived
to hear that someone else is having the same (or similar) problem, and it's
not just us.

--Dave


--

*DAVID A. CURRY, CISSP* * DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION SECURITY

*THE NEW SCHOOL* * 55 W. 13TH STREET * NEW YORK, NY 10011

+1 212 229-5300 x4728 * david.curry () newschool edu



On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 6:15 PM, Peter Setlak <psetlak () colgate edu> wrote:

> Over the past few weeks we saw a dramatic increase in the level and
> sophistication of phishing against our domain. The phishers not only used
> compromised accounts from other Universities but from our own as well. They
> also copied some images from our main website as well as screen-scraped our
> accounts-reset page.
>
> There seem to have been two different campaigns going; one more
> sophisticated than the other.
>
> They only sent emails at night or early morning, none were sent to my
> inbox (security admin).
>
> We use Google Apps and of course, they were of no real help.
>
> I was able to track down the logins from an IP range owned by Spotflux VPN
> services (spotflux.com). The IP range was 162.210.196.160-175.
>
> We also saw logins from a Nigerian IP range (41.203.69.x).
>
> After contacting their support, one of their techs was able to correlate
> some information and found 142 different machines in the Nigerian IP range
> was using their VPN service. He null-routed them and it has been a few
> hours but we have not seen any logins since.
>
> Has anyone else seen this uptick in phishing?
> Has anyone else seen these IP ranges knocking at their doors?
> Has anyone else seen this scenario before?
> Does anyone have suggestions for working with Google to get better
> reporting and options?
>
> I would really like to see the ability to do two things through Google:
>
> 1. Deny certain IP ranges from successfully authenticating into our
> domain. Obviously, Google has to allow all users from anywhere use their
> services; if I could set our App domain to automatically log someone out if
> they logged-in from a certain IP range, that would be very helpful. We have
> no students in Nigeria (currently).
>
> 2. Pull an email from users' inboxes before they respond. In this case,
> perhaps the first 15 users in my domain might see and click on the email -
> hopefully at least one sends it to ITS. Then, we could pull that email from
> the remaining users' inboxes before they ever get a chance to open it.
>
> Perhaps there is something Google offers or a Google-integrated
> third-party offers that would allow me to do this?
>
> --
> Thank you,
>
> Peter J. Setlak
> Network Security Analyst, GSEC, GLEG, GCPM
> Colgate University
> ---
> psetlak () colgate edu
> (315) 228-7151
> Case-Geyer 450
> skype: petersetlak
>
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