Microsoft Office SharePoint Targeted With High-Risk Phish, Ransomware Attacks

Microsoft Office SharePoint Targeted With High-Risk Phish, Ransomware Attacks

 A phishing campaign, discovered by researchers at Cofense, is draping itself in a Microsoft Office SharePoint theme and successfully bypassing security email gateways (SEGs). In a post on Tuesday, the firm said that this is an example of why it’s not always prudent to share documents via Microsoft’s hugely popular, widely used SharePoint collaboration platform. 

The phish is targeting Office 365 users with a legitimate-looking SharePoint document that claims to urgently need an email signature. The campaign cropped up in a spot that’s supposed to be protected by Microsoft’s own SEG. This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen the SEG sanctuary get polluted:: In December, spearphishers spoofed Microsoft.com itself to target 200 million Office 365 users, successfully slipping past SEG controls due to Microsoft’s reported failure to enforce domain-based message authentication, reporting & conformance (DMARC): an email authentication protocol built specifically to stop exact domain spoofing (SPF/DKIM).

‘Response Urgently…?’

As this image of the text in the phishing email exhibits, the spelling and grammar made use of in the boobytrapped message aren’t the most egregious, atrociously spelled, syntactically weird giveaways you can uncover in these kinds of phishing campaigns. But then once more, it is probably secure to presume that any SharePoint concept that asks you to “response urgently” isn’t coming from a indigenous speaker. 

The mere actuality that the concept presses urgency on its recipients really should be a idea-off, of course: “Rush-rush” is a regular phishing ploy. Cofense notes that other red flags consist of the fact that the user’s name is not obvious in the opening message: an indication that it’s a mass-distribution campaign meant to access a lot of targets.

As effectively, when recipients hover about the hyperlink, they’ll see disguise nor hair of any reference to Microsoft. All those who click on on the backlink will in its place be shuffled more than to the landing page proven down below, which display’s Microsoft’s SharePoint brand and the “Pending file” notification in front  of a blurry background and a ask for for the supposed sufferer to log in to check out the document. That “could suffice for threat actors to extract and harvest users’ particular info,” Cofense says. If and when credentials are handed around, the campaign redirects the user to a spoofed, unrelated document, “which might be adequate to trick the consumer into wondering this is a genuine transaction,” Cofense says.