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The FBI Created a Fake FedEx Website To Unmask a Cybercriminal (9to5mac.com)
In an attempt to catch two cybercriminals, the FBI set up a fake FedEx website and created rigged Word documents, "both of which were designed to reveal the IP address of the fraudsters," reports Motherboard. From the report: The first case centers around Gorbel, a cranes and ergonomic lifting manufacturing company headquartered in Fishers, New York, according to court records. Here, the cybercriminals used a long, potentially confusing and official looking email address to pose as the company's CEO Brian Reh, and emailed the accounts team asking for payment for a new vendor. The fraudsters provided a W9 form of a particular company, and the finance department mailed a check for over $82,000. Gorbel noticed the fraudulent transaction, and brought in the FBI in July. Shortly after, Gorbel received other emails pretending to be Reh, asking for another transfer. This time, the finance department and FBI were ready. The FBI created a fake FedEx website and sent that to the target, in the hope it would capture the hacker's IP address, according to court records. The FBI even concocted a fake "Access Denied, This website does not allow proxy connections" page in order to entice the cybercriminal to connect from an identifiable address.
That FedEx unmasking attempt was not successful, it seems -- the cybercriminal checked the link from six different IP addresses, some including proxies -- and the FBI moved on to use a network investigative technique, or NIT, instead. NIT is an umbrella term the FBI uses for a variety of hacking approaches. The FBI attempted to locate the cybercriminals with a Word document containing an image that would connect to the FBI server and reveal the target's IP address, according to court records. The image was a screenshot of a FedEx tracking portal for a sent payment, the court records add. Motherboard also details the second case that occurred in August 2017, where a business in the Western District of New York received an email claiming to be from Invermar, a Chilean seafood vendor and one of the company's suppliers, according to court records: This email, posing as a known employee of Invermar, asked the victim to send funds to a new bank account. Whereas the legitimate Invermar domain ends with a .cl suffix, the hackers used one ending in .us. The business the hackers targeted apparently didn't notice the different suffix, and over the course of September and October wire transferred around $1.2 million to the cybercriminals, with the victim eventually able to recover $300,000 (the court documents don't specify how exactly, although a charge back seems likely). To determine where this criminal was located, the FBI also decided to deploy a NIT.
"The FBI will provide an email attachment to the victim which will be used to pose as a form to be filled out by the TARGET USER for future payment from the VICTIM," one court record reads. The NIT required the target to exit "protected mode," a setting in Microsoft Word that stops documents from connecting to the internet. The warrant application says the government does not believe it needs a warrant to send a target an embedded image, but out of an abundance of caution, added to the fact that the target will need to deliberately exit protected mode, the FBI applied for one anyway. Both NITs were designed to only obtain a target's IP address and User Agent String, according to the warrant applications. A User Agent String can reveal what operating system a target is using. Although signed by two different FBI Special Agents, both of the NIT warrant applications come out of the Cyber Squad, Buffalo Division, in Rochester, New York.
That FedEx unmasking attempt was not successful, it seems -- the cybercriminal checked the link from six different IP addresses, some including proxies -- and the FBI moved on to use a network investigative technique, or NIT, instead. NIT is an umbrella term the FBI uses for a variety of hacking approaches. The FBI attempted to locate the cybercriminals with a Word document containing an image that would connect to the FBI server and reveal the target's IP address, according to court records. The image was a screenshot of a FedEx tracking portal for a sent payment, the court records add. Motherboard also details the second case that occurred in August 2017, where a business in the Western District of New York received an email claiming to be from Invermar, a Chilean seafood vendor and one of the company's suppliers, according to court records: This email, posing as a known employee of Invermar, asked the victim to send funds to a new bank account. Whereas the legitimate Invermar domain ends with a .cl suffix, the hackers used one ending in .us. The business the hackers targeted apparently didn't notice the different suffix, and over the course of September and October wire transferred around $1.2 million to the cybercriminals, with the victim eventually able to recover $300,000 (the court documents don't specify how exactly, although a charge back seems likely). To determine where this criminal was located, the FBI also decided to deploy a NIT.
"The FBI will provide an email attachment to the victim which will be used to pose as a form to be filled out by the TARGET USER for future payment from the VICTIM," one court record reads. The NIT required the target to exit "protected mode," a setting in Microsoft Word that stops documents from connecting to the internet. The warrant application says the government does not believe it needs a warrant to send a target an embedded image, but out of an abundance of caution, added to the fact that the target will need to deliberately exit protected mode, the FBI applied for one anyway. Both NITs were designed to only obtain a target's IP address and User Agent String, according to the warrant applications. A User Agent String can reveal what operating system a target is using. Although signed by two different FBI Special Agents, both of the NIT warrant applications come out of the Cyber Squad, Buffalo Division, in Rochester, New York.
Re "next approach". They keep the powerful tools off the net as much as possible.
Cant have consumer AV discovering and reporting back on gov pushed software in the wild.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That is some weak sauce right there, FBI.
It's not stupid if it works. Social engineering is simply hacking a human instead of hacking computer program.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
We all do, which begs the question, if this worked, why is it being posted here? Why do we need operational details on a sting against financial scammers?
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
Although I admire the FBI's attempt to try to catch these guys as I've been hit by these fraudsters trying to pose as me or my accountants, emailing customers with invoices that look legitimate as mine and my people internally. But the FBI's technique was rather weak and exposes a huge weakness in a lot of corporate environments. A lot of these places have no way to check the legitimacy and will pay right away. This is a bigger problem than people realize.