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posted by chromas on Friday June 19 2020, @10:33PM   Printer-friendly

BofA Phish Gets Around DMARC, Other Email Protections:

A credential-phishing attempt that relies on impersonating Bank of America has emerged in the U.S. this month, with emails that get around secure gateway protections and heavy-hitting protections like DMARC.

The campaign involves emails that ask recipients to update their email addresses, warning users that their accounts could be recycled if this isn’t done.

“The email language and topic was intended to induce urgency in the reader owing to its financial nature,” according to analysis from Armorblox. “Asking readers to update the email account for their bank lest it get recycled is a powerful motivator for anyone to click on the URL and follow through.”

The messages contain a link that purports to take visitors to a site to update their information – but clicking the link simply takes the recipients to a credential-phishing page that closely mirrors a legitimate Bank of America home page, researchers said.

The attack flow also included a page that asked readers for their ‘security challenge questions’, both to increase legitimacy as well as get further identifying information from targets, researchers said in a posting on Thursday.

“With the enforcement of Single Sign On (SSO) and two-factor authentication (2FA) across organizations, adversaries are now crafting email attacks that are able to bypass these measures,” Chetan Anand, co-founder and architect of Armorblox, told Theatpost. “This credential-phishing attack is a good example. Firstly, it phishes for Bank of America credentials, which are likely not to be included under company SSO policies. Secondly, it also phishes for answers to security-challenge questions, which is often used as a second/additional form of authentication. Asking security-challenge questions not only increases the legitimacy of the attack, but also provides the adversaries with vital personal information about their targets.”


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @03:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @03:11AM (#1010244)

    DMARC is an email authentication protocol [ietf.org].

    Protocol info page [rfc-editor.org]:

    Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is a scalable mechanism by which a mail-originating organization can express domain-level policies and preferences for message validation, disposition, and reporting, that a mail-receiving organization can use to improve mail handling.

    Originators of Internet Mail need to be able to associate reliable and authenticated domain identifiers with messages, communicate policies about messages that use those identifiers, and report about mail using those identifiers. These abilities have several benefits: Receivers can provide feedback to Domain Owners about the use of their domains; this feedback can provide valuable insight about the management of internal operations and the presence of external domain name abuse.

    DMARC does not produce or encourage elevated delivery privilege of authenticated email. DMARC is a mechanism for policy distribution that enables increasingly strict handling of messages that fail authentication checks, ranging from no action, through altered delivery, up to message rejection.

    More background:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework [wikipedia.org]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail [wikipedia.org]

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