Menace actors are more and more focusing on trusted enterprise platforms corresponding to Dropbox, SharePoint, and QuickBooks of their phishing e-mail campaigns and leveraging respectable domains to bypass safety measures, a brand new report launched right this moment has discovered. By embedding sender addresses or payload hyperlinks inside respectable domains, attackers evade conventional detection strategies and deceive unsuspecting customers.
In accordance with Darktrace’s Annual Menace Report 2024, the authors detected greater than 30.4 million phishing emails, reinforcing phishing as the popular assault method.
Respectable enterprise companies hijacked for many phishing campaigns in 2024
Darktrace famous cybercriminals are exploiting third-party enterprise companies, together with Zoom Docs, HelloSign, Adobe, and Microsoft SharePoint. In 2024, 96% of phishing emails utilised present domains fairly than registering new ones, making them onerous to detect.
Attackers have been noticed utilizing redirects through respectable companies, corresponding to Google, to ship malicious payloads. Within the case of the Dropbox assault, the e-mail contained a hyperlink resulting in a Dropbox-hosted PDF with an embedded malicious URL.
SEE: How enterprise e-mail compromise assaults emulate respectable net companies to lure clicks
Alternatively, risk actors abused hijacked e-mail accounts, together with these from Amazon Easy E-mail Service, belonging to enterprise companions, distributors, and different trusted third-parties. The report’s authors say this “spotlight(s) that identification continues to be an costly downside throughout the property and a persistent supply of ache throughout enterprise and enterprise networks.”
Phishing assaults surge with AI-generated ways
Among the many phishing emails that Darktrace discovered:
- 2.7 million contained multistage malicious payloads.
- Greater than 940,000 contained malicious QR codes.
The sophistication of phishing makes an attempt continues to rise, with spear phishing — highly-targeted e-mail assaults — making up 38% of instances. In the meantime, 32% use novel social engineering strategies corresponding to AI-generated textual content with linguistic complexity. This complexity may manifest as elevated textual content quantity, punctuation, or sentence size.
Darktrace collated insights from its greater than 10,000 international prospects for its Annual Menace Report 2024, leveraging self-learning AI, anomaly-based detection, and thorough evaluation from its risk analysis crew.
Residing-off-the-land strategies: A rising safety risk
One other assault technique includes preliminary community breaches through vulnerabilities in edge, perimeter or internet-facing gadgets, adopted by living-off-the-land strategies or LOTL.This technique exploits pre-installed, respectable enterprise instruments to execute malicious actions whereas avoiding detection.
Darktrace discovered that 40% of recognized marketing campaign exercise in early 2024 concerned the exploitation of internet-facing gadgets, together with from Ivanti Join Safe, Ivanti Coverage Safe, Palo Alto Community, and Fortinet. Attackers favor LOTL strategies as a result of they remove the necessity for customized malware and scale back the danger of triggering conventional safety alerts.
On prime of exploiting vulnerabilities in these edge gadgets, risk actors are more and more utilizing stolen credentials to log into distant community entry options like VPNs for preliminary community entry, earlier than leveraging LOTL strategies.
Ransomware teams exploit enterprise instruments for stealth assaults
Ransomware teams — together with Akira, RansomHub, Black Basta, Fog, and Qilin, together with rising actors Lynx — have more and more been utilizing respectable enterprise software program. Darktrace has noticed these teams utilizing:
- AnyDesk and Atera to masks command-and-control communications.
- Knowledge exfiltration to cloud storage companies.
- File-transfer expertise for fast exploitation and double extortion.
SEE: Most Ransomware Assaults Happen When Safety Workers Are Asleep, Examine Finds
These teams are additionally often recruited for Ransomware-as-a-Service or Malware-as-a-Service, with the usage of MaaS instruments growing by 17% from the primary to the second half of 2024. Use of Distant Entry Trojans, malware which permits an attacker to remotely management an contaminated system, additionally elevated by 34% over the identical interval.
