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This year, our goal is to help brands fight back by sharing approachable ways for beginners and seasoned cybersecurity professionals alike to keep their organizations safe. Phishing and other malicious sites have distinct characteristics we can use to identify and defeat them. These 'red flags' can help determine which pages, apps, and URLs are legitimate and those spun up by threat actors to target brands and customers.

You don't need a holiday miracle to keep your brand and organization safe this holiday shopping season. We hope this guide will be a force multiplier and empower e-commerce stakeholders to overcome resources shortages or cyber skills gaps to identify cyber threats endemic to the holiday shopping season.

In early 2021, RiskIQ first detected a new phishing campaign targeting PayPal. The campaign, authored by an actor calling themself "Vagabon," looks to collect PayPal login credentials and complete credit card information from the victim. 

The kit doesn't display many unique characteristics and is a textbook example of a "Frankenstein" kit. In this increasingly popular trend, threat actors piece together new phish kits from modular, free, or readily available kits and services. 

Knowing the infrastructure and its connections helps security teams map, monitor, and track adversary-threat infrastructure and its composition—malware, suspicious activity, threat capabilities, shareable attack tools, and their relationships within the worldwide attack surface. 

As part of our ongoing research into malware distribution infrastructure, we investigated "Mana Tools," a malware distribution and command and control (C2) panel associated with several big names in the malware world, including RevengeRat, AzoRult, Lokibot, Formbook, and Agent Tesla. 

Mana Tools was first reported in 2019 by Yoroi researchers who identified it as a fork of the AzoRult 3.2 malware created by a Pakistani actor known as Hagga. The Mana Tools logo appears on current samples of the Mana Tools panel. Using RiskIQ's dataset, we were able to find several Mana Tools login pages. 

Cybersecurity has gotten pretty tough lately. Today's teams contend with an ever-growing IT ecosystem accelerated by critical digital transformation efforts and moving workforces into remote environments. At the same time, they're managing a rapidly evolving threat landscape composed of both sophisticated nation-state actors and a crush of low-level criminals armed with off-the-shelf crimeware. All told, cybercrime now costs organizations a whopping $1,797,945 per minute. 

As cyberthreats increase, security analysts are our first line of defense. Their skills, know-how, and passion for their work meet attackers head-on. Unfortunately, these analysts often lack the resources, technology, and latest techniques to defeat them. 

Defending your organization's attack surface in today's threat landscape is a global-scale challenge full of continuously changing elements. 

Attacker tools have flooded the web, and advanced adversaries target massive vulnerabilities in ubiquitous systems used across the world. To defend their organizations, security teams need actionable threat intelligence that provides a bird's eye view of the global attack surface and shows precisely how their organization's unique Internet relationships fit inside it—and how these relationships are affected by new threats. 

Unfortunately, analysts usually aren’t equipped with the threat intelligence they need. Often, they have intel that's too generic or entirely irrelevant to their organization’s attack surface. And, even if their threat intel is relevant and actionable, applying it across the teams, tools, and systems in their organization is an incredible challenge. 

On March 2, 2021, Microsoft announced that four previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities were exploited to attack on-premises versions of the Microsoft Exchange Servers.  Microsoft has reported that attackers exploited these vulnerabilities to gain access to Exchange servers, gain access to email accounts, and deploy malware (typically web shells) for long-term persistent access to victim organizations.  Microsoft credited a security company called Volexity for first observing these exploits on January 6, 2021. These vulnerabilities do not affect Microsoft Office 365 or Azure Cloud deployments of Exchange email servers.

Microsoft has reported they have attributed these attacks to a threat actor group it calls HAFNIUM and assessed it is a People’s Republic of China sponsored campaign.  Additional details of HAFNIUM targeting and attack techniques are included in Microsoft’s security blog. Meanwhile, FireEye’s analysis indicates this attack has ties activity it tracks across three unknown attack clusters and provides additional analysis and indicators in their blog.

A recent Interisle Consulting Group research report, WHOIS Contact Data Availability, and Registrant Classification Study, finds that more than half of the top-level-domains under ICANN's remit are now controlled by unidentifiable parties. According to the report, "ICANN's policy has allowed registrars and registry operators to hide much more contact data than is required by the GDPR-perhaps five times as much..." 

Regardless of if contact data is ultimately needed to maintain a secure and interoperable Internet, it is now more important than ever to leverage available threat intelligence to combat harmful cyber activity. Traditionally, WHOIS has told analysts who owns a domain. Threat hunters used to be able to use this information to pivot on names, addresses, and phone numbers to find other domains registered to the same owner. For the most part, GDPR broke that.

With WHOIS becoming significantly less useful to build out threat investigations, threat analysts must rely more frequently on other internet data sets as part of their digital tool belt. RiskIQ has made it a core part of our business to collect and correlate as much relevant Internet data as possible to supercharge threat investigations—data that's become even more valuable to analysts since the advent of the GDPR. 

We recently analyzed LogoKit, a simple, modularized, and adaptable phish kit running on thousands of domains. Easy to use and able to accommodate a wide range of attacker skill levels, LogoKit is a hot commodity on the black market. 

LogoKit's popularity has given rise to enterprising threat actors who manufacture, package, and sell the kit to meet a strong and still growing demand among cybercriminals worldwide. However, these crimeware purveyors are more than just cybercriminals; they're also expert marketers who use social media sites, web forums, and messaging apps to build their brand, advertise their product, and streamline transactions.

After analyzing LogoKit itself last week, we took a closer look at the infrastructure and criminal enterprise behind it. The resulting investigation illuminated a massive phishing ecosystem and thriving crimeware economy driven by a high demand for simple, effective phishing tools. Below, we'll look at a major player in the sale of LogoKit. 

There will be many more breaches like the one of SolarWinds. 

Moving into 2021 and beyond, the ability to view your organization from the outside-in, as attackers do, will be the best defense against these internet-scale attacks by advanced APTs. FireEye and other security experts analyzing early information on SunBurst have said mass scanning and internet-scale data are critical to incident response efforts. This real-time global visibility shows security teams if their organization is affected and helps uncover attacker fingerprints on the network. 

RiskIQ is helping organizations respond to attacks like SunBurst with our Internet Intelligence Graph, built by mapping the Internet via over ten years of crawling and mass scanning. Our brand new JARM feature will help incident responders quickly query this graph, putting the world’s largest index of applications, components, and behaviors at their fingertips for a smarter, faster response.