A number of common themes were observed during our research into phishing attacks, and it is clear that attackers are employing a blend of tools and techniques to improve their chances of success. We will now briefly review two such techniques - mass scanning and combination attacks.
Analysis of a number of compromised honeypots suggests that the systems were being attacked using automated attack scripts or exploits, often known as autorooters. In both the incidents described in phishing technique one above, once the attackers had compromised the honeypots, autorooter toolkits were uploaded to the server. The attackers then attempted to scan large ranges of IP addresses for similarly vulnerable servers (using scanners called "superwu" in the German incident and "mole" in the UK incident). Captured attacker keystrokes from the UK incident are show below, showing examples of the types of mass scanning activity attempted from compromised honeypots. Note that due to the honeynet configuration, hostile outbound traffic was blocked and these attacks did not succeed.
Attacker extracts scanner and attempts to scan class B network blocks:
In the final example above, note that the hosts that the attacker attempts to compromise are not part of the IP address ranges scanned from this honeypot, which again provides evidence of well coordinated and parallel mass scanning activity.
Further investigation of the mole.tgz file downloaded by UK attackers revealed a number of text files in the root directory of the unpacked autorooter toolkit. These files included scan configurations and logs of previous scanning activity for the "grabbb2.x and samba2.2.8 vulnerability". 42 cases of attacks against other hosts were present in these files, along with evidence of mass scanning of many class B network blocks, confirming that the observed incident was part of larger and more organised attack against similar systems. An example of the output from the mole scanning tool, viewed from an attacker's perspective, can be found here.
Finally, some of the mass scanning tools recovered from compromised honeypots do not appear to be in popular circulation, which suggests that the attackers had some level of development and tool smith capabilities beyond basic script kiddy activity, or were part of a closed community that did not share their tools in public forums. Again, this suggests more organised attackers.
In our research, we also observed that phishers are frequently combining the three attacking techniques we have observed and documented in this white paper, sometimes combining multiple methods to provide redundancy and protect their phishing infrastructure through implementation of a two-stage networking configuration. The following diagram depicts a possible phishing network topology:
In this example a central web server hosts the physical phishing content, often serving more then one web site (e.g. an eBay phishing-site in /ebay and a PayPal phishing-site in /paypal). Several compromised remote computers redirect incoming HTTP traffic on TCP port 80 to the central web server with the help of the redir port redirector. This has several advantages from an attacker's point of view when compared to a single phishing web site:
The use of such techniques again suggests more organised and capable attackers, rather than the work of simple script kiddies. Similar operational models are often used by major web hosting companies and high volume content providers.