Since the pandemic, the usage of VPNs has increased intensely. The recent VPN phishing campaigns are so productive because employees who work from home depend on VPNs to connect with their company servers, and access sensitive data remotely.
According to a blog post by Abnormal security, an email security company, “numerous versions of these attacks have been seen across different clients, from different sender emails and originating from different IP addresses. However, the same payload link was employed by all of these attacks, implying that a single attacker that controls the phishing website sent it.” Also, as much as 15,000 targets have received these phishing emails.
Security experts indicated that these campaigns are to masquerade as legitimate messages informing workers about their VPN configuration update. They are sent to unsuspecting users claiming to be from the organization’s IT support department.
Office 365 Credentials
To achieve effective results, the design of the phishing campaigns are in a convincingly, elaborate manner.
Their landing page mimics the original Microsoft Office 365 login pages and even displays a secure padlock; since they are using a web.core.windows.net wildcard SSL certificate. This is achieved via misapplication of Azure Blob Storage platform.
They also go as far as customizing the sender address in their phishing emails to resemble the target companies’ domain. Thereby prompting users to open the email.
The VPN configuration embedded in the email redirects users to a phishing landing page; a mimic of Microsoft Office 365 pages. Once logged in, they steal the users’ login details.
With all these carefully calculated steps, users do not hesitate to log in with their details.
Users are encouraged to take security measures by only logging In their Office 365 details in certified Microsoft pages on microsoft.com, outlook.com or live.com domains.
