Researchers at Zimperium warn that a big phishing marketing campaign is impersonating the US Postal Service (USPS) to focus on cell units with malicious PDF recordsdata.
The objective of the marketing campaign is to direct customers to a spoofed USPS web site designed to reap private data.
“The investigation into this marketing campaign uncovered over 20 malicious PDF recordsdata and 630 phishing pages, indicating a large-scale operation,” the researchers write.
“Additional evaluation revealed a malicious infrastructure, beginning with touchdown pages designed to steal information, that might probably impression organizations throughout 50+ international locations.
This marketing campaign employs a posh and beforehand unseen approach to cover clickable parts, making it tough for many endpoint safety options to correctly analyze the hidden hyperlinks.”
Notably, the phishing marketing campaign used a brand new obfuscation approach that allowed the malicious hyperlinks to evade detection by safety merchandise.
“The PDFs used on this marketing campaign embed clickable hyperlinks with out using the usual /URI tag, making it tougher to extract URLs throughout evaluation,” Zimperium explains. “Our researchers verified that this technique enabled recognized malicious URLs inside PDF recordsdata to bypass detection by a number of endpoint safety options. In distinction, the identical URLs have been detected when the usual /URI tag was used. This highlights the effectiveness of this system in obscuring malicious URLs.”
The researchers notice that PDFs are generally utilized in enterprise settings, so staff must be cautious of attackers utilizing these recordsdata to ship phishing hyperlinks.
“The widespread use of PDFs is introducing important safety dangers to the enterprise, notably when focused to cell units,” the researchers write. “PDFs have grow to be a typical vector for phishing assaults, malware, and exploits attributable to their potential to embed malicious hyperlinks, scripts, or payloads. On cell platforms, the place customers typically have restricted visibility into file contents earlier than opening, these threats can simply bypass conventional safety measures.”
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Zimperium has the story.
