Attack Techniques: Priming Attacks on Legitimate Sites

Earlier today, we looked at two techniques for attackers to evade anti-phishing filters by using lures that are not served from http and https urls that are subject to reputation analysis. A third attack technique is to send a lure that entices a user to visit a legitimate site and perform an unsafe operation onContinue reading “Attack Techniques: Priming Attacks on Legitimate Sites”

Attack Techniques: Phishing via Mailto

Earlier today, we looked at a technique where a phisher serves his attack from the user’s own computer so that anti-phishing code like SmartScreen and SafeBrowsing do not have a meaningful URL to block. A similar technique is to encode the attack within a mailto URL, because anti-phishing scanners and email clients rarely apply reputationContinue reading “Attack Techniques: Phishing via Mailto”

Attack Techniques: Phishing via Local Files

One attack technique I’ve seen in use recently involves enticing the victim to enter their password into a locally-downloaded HTML file. The attack begins by the victim receiving an email lure with a HTML file attachment (for me, often with the .shtml file extension): When the user opens the file, a HTML-based credential prompt isContinue reading “Attack Techniques: Phishing via Local Files”

TLS Certificate Verification Changes in Edge

Last Updated August 21 2023: When establishing a secure HTTPS connection with a server, a browser must validate that the certificate sent by the server is valid — that is to say, that: In the past, Chromium running on Windows delegated this validation task to APIs in the operating system, layering a minimal set ofContinue reading “TLS Certificate Verification Changes in Edge”