SASE Week 2023 On-Demand! Explore sessions.

  • Security Service Edge Products

    Protect against advanced and cloud-enabled threats and safeguard data across all vectors.

  • Borderless SD-WAN

    Confidently provide secure, high-performance access to every remote user, device, site, and cloud.

The platform of the future is Netskope

Intelligent Security Service Edge (SSE), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Cloud Firewall, Next Generation Secure Web Gateway (SWG), and Private Access for ZTNA built natively into a single solution to help every business on its journey to Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture.

Go to Products Overview
Netskope video
Borderless SD-WAN: Ushering in the New Era of Borderless Enterprise

Netskope Borderless SD-WAN offers an architecture that converges zero trust principles and assured application performance to provide unprecedented secure, high-performance connectivity for every site, cloud, remote user, and IoT device.

Read the article
Borderless SD-WAN
  • NewEdge

    NewEdge is the world’s largest, highest-performing security private cloud.

  • Cloud Security Platform

    Unrivaled visibility and real-time data and threat protection on the world's largest security private cloud.

  • Technology Partners & Integrations

    Netskope partners with the strongest companies in enterprise technology.

Embrace a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture

Netskope NewEdge is the world’s largest, highest-performing security private cloud and provides customers with unparalleled service coverage, performance and resilience.

Learn about NewEdge
NewEdge
Your Network of Tomorrow

Plan your path toward a faster, more secure, and more resilient network designed for the applications and users that you support.

Get the white paper
Your Network of Tomorrow
Netskope Cloud Exchange

The Netskope Cloud Exchange (CE) provides customers with powerful integration tools to leverage investments across their security posture.

Learn about Cloud Exchange
Netskope video
Make the move to market-leading cloud security services with minimal latency and high reliability.

Learn about NewEdge
Lighted highway through mountainside switchbacks
Safely enable the use of generative AI applications with application access control, real-time user coaching, and best-in-class data protection.

Learn how we secure generative AI use
Safely Enable ChatGPT and Generative AI
Zero trust solutions for SSE and SASE deployments

Learn about Zero Trust
Boat driving through open sea
Netskope enables a safe, cloud-smart, and fast journey to adopt cloud services, apps, and public cloud infrastructure.

Learn about Industry Solutions
Wind turbines along cliffside
  • Resources

    Learn more about how Netskope can help you secure your journey to the cloud.

  • Blog

    Learn how Netskope enables security and networking transformation through security service edge (SSE).

  • Events & Workshops

    Stay ahead of the latest security trends and connect with your peers.

  • Security Defined

    Everything you need to know in our cybersecurity encyclopedia.

Security Visionaries Podcast

Unveiling the Under-reported Aspects of AI
Emily Wearmouth sits down with Neil Thacker, EMEA CISO, Yihua Liao, Head of Netskope AI Labs, and Suzanne Oliver, Director of IP Strategy at Scintilla, to discuss the topics in the realm of AI that they each wish people were discussing more.

Play the podcast
Unveiling the Under-reported Aspects of AI Social card
Latest Blogs

How Netskope can enable the Zero Trust and SASE journey through security service edge (SSE) capabilities.

Read the blog
Sunrise and cloudy sky
SASE Week 2023: Your SASE journey starts now!

Replay sessions from the fourth annual SASE Week.

Explore sessions
SASE Week 2023
What is Security Service Edge?

Explore the security side of SASE, the future of network and protection in the cloud.

Learn about Security Service Edge
Four-way roundabout
  • Our Customers

    Netskope serves more than 2,000 customers worldwide including more than 25 of the Fortune 100

  • Customer Solutions

    We are here for you and with you every step of the way, ensuring your success with Netskope.

  • Netskope Community

    Learn from other network, data, and security professionals.

  • Training and Certification

    Netskope training will help you become a cloud security expert.

We help our customers to be Ready for Anything

See our Customers
Woman smiling with glasses looking out window
Netskope’s talented and experienced Professional Services team provides a prescriptive approach to your successful implementation.

Learn about Professional Services
Netskope Professional Services
The Netskope Community can help you and your team get more value out of products and practices.

Go to the Netskope Community
The Netskope Community
Secure your digital transformation journey and make the most of your cloud, web, and private applications with Netskope training.

Learn about Training and Certifications
Group of young professionals working
  • Company

    We help you stay ahead of cloud, data, and network security challenges.

  • Why Netskope

    Cloud transformation and work from anywhere have changed how security needs to work.

  • Leadership

    Our leadership team is fiercely committed to doing everything it takes to make our customers successful.

  • Partners

    We partner with security leaders to help you secure your journey to the cloud.

Supporting sustainability through data security

Netskope is proud to participate in Vision 2045: an initiative aimed to raise awareness on private industry’s role in sustainability.

Find out more
Supporting Sustainability Through Data Security
Highest in Execution. Furthest in Vision.

Netskope recognized as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge.

Get the report
Netskope recognized as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge.
Thinkers, builders, dreamers, innovators. Together, we deliver cutting-edge cloud security solutions to help our customers protect their data and people.

Meet our team
Group of hikers scaling a snowy mountain
Netskope’s partner-centric go-to-market strategy enables our partners to maximize their growth and profitability while transforming enterprise security.

Learn about Netskope Partners
Group of diverse young professionals smiling

Phishing as a Service – Phishing revamped

Jul 12 2017
Tags
Bitcoin
Cloudphishing
Netskope Threat Protection
Netskope Threat Research Labs
PhaaS

Netskope Threat Research Labs recently discovered a Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) platform named Hackshit, that records the credentials of the phished bait victims. The phished bait pages are packaged with base64 encoding and served from secure (HTTPS) websites with “.moe” top level domain (TLD) to evade traditional scanners. “.moe” TLD is intended for the purpose of ‘The marketing of products or services deemed’. The victim’s credentials are sent to the Hackshit PhaaS platform via websockets. The Netskope Active Platform can proactively protect customers by creating custom applications and a policy to block all the activities related to Hackshit PhaaS. This blog will detail the discovery of Hackshit PhaaS, the inner working and revenue model of this PhaaS platform.

Discovery of the PhaaS

During our ongoing research about the trends of CloudPhishing attacks, we observed a phishing page using data URI scheme to serve base64 encoded content (data:text/html;base64) delivered from “https://a.safe.moe”. When the link was accessed, it presented a phished Google Docs page asking for credentials as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: First phished page asking for credentials

Once the credentials are entered, it presented another phishing page whose source uses a data URI scheme to serve base64 encoded content (data:text/html;base64) again from https://a.safe.moe as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Second Phished page asking for recovery details

The first phishing page was intended to get the victim’s email credentials whereas the second phished page was intended to get the recovery details of the email account of the victim. After the details are entered, the victim is redirected to the original Google recovery page.

We decoded these two phishing pages to find out further details of the functionality. The snippets of the first and second decoded pages are shown in Figure 3 and Figure 4.

Figure 3: First decoded phishing page asking for credentials

Figure 4: Second decoded phished page asking for recovery details

As highlighted in the snippets of the decoded pages above, the credentials are sent to the attacker via a websocket to https://pod[.]logshit[.]com and https://pod-1[.]logshit[.]com. A sample packet capture of the same is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Network capture to pod[.]logshit[.]com via websocket

Accessing logshit[.]com led us to the discovery of the PhaaS website named Hackshit as shown in Figure 6. Further research concluded the website is serving as a PhaaS platform.

Figure 6: Hackshit web page

Hackshit Phishing as a Service

Hackshit serves as a PhaaS platform that caters several phishing services and also a marketplace to buy and sell such services.

Related subdomains

VirusTotal passive DNS resolved several domains related to Hackshit as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7: Passive DNS of domains related to Hackshit

Hackshit webportal

The Hackshit website had a video demonstration appealing users to learning hacking, meeting hackers online and making money. The website has a presence in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. The portal allowed users to create a free account and also have a free trial of the services offered.  The registration page is as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8: Registration page of Hackshit PhaaS

SSL certificate

Hackshit[.]com is powered with a SSL server certificate by LetsEncrypt that provides free, automated, and open certificate authority by the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). The SSL certificate of the website is shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9: SSL server certificate of HackShit

The website contained inline manuals, free tutorials, chat support, comments section, links/generator, logs and a marketplace.

Subscription pricing

Hackshit PhaaS offers several subscription tiers from Starter to Master, ranging from 40 USD per week to 250 USD for 2 months as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10: Hackshit subscription pricing

Payment modes

The payments are accepted via most of the payment methods as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11: Hackshit payment modes

Links / Generator

The links/generator option provided several links for creating phished page links when clicked on ‘Generate’ option below the theme as shown in Figure 12.

Figure 12: Links/ Generator page of Hackshit

At the time of writing, all the links in the link generator were encoded with base64 and hosted in HTTP Secure file sharing websites with “.moe” TLD. The generated links can be viewed in the currently running pages option as shown in Figure 13.

Figure 13: Currently running phished pages

Details of the phished page like creation date, visits, user’s, IP address, and country can be seen from the info option as shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14: Phished page information

There is also an additional option to generate a decoy PDF embedded with the link as shown in Figure 15.

Figure 15: Decoy PDF generator

We observed threat actors in the recent past using PDF decoys generated from this service. Here is our research on similar PDF decoy cases. An example of the message displayed while launching some of the PDF decoys we have seen is shown in Figure 16.

Figure 16: Messages displayed when launching the PDF decoys

Logs

The logs contain the details of the victim’s credentials as shown in Figure 17.

Figure 17: Logs containing victim credentials

Marketplace

The marketplace is a portal that offers services to purchase and sell for carrying out the phishing attacks. The options offered for purchasing is shown in Figure 18.

Figure 18: Hackshit Marketplace

Mobile App Launch

A recent announcement in the Facebook page had a post of the announcement on launching mobile app version of Hackshit as shown in Figure 19.

Figure 19: Announcement of mobile app version

The latest post dated 27 June mentioned the completion of the Mobile App Development.

Working of the Hackshit PhaaS

Based on one of the video tutorials we observed, the attacker purchases site login accounts of compromised victim from the marketplace using Perfect Money or bitcoins. The attacker then generates a phished page from the page/generator link and logs into the email account of the compromised victim, views all the contacts and sends an email embedded with the phished link.

After this is done, the attacker retrieves all the sent emails by creating a filter.  After the results from the filter are fetched and confirmed, the attacker creates a filter to delete all the traces of the phished email sent to the contacts. An example one of the filter created is shown in Figure 20.

Figure 20: Filtering the sent phished email

The attacker then monitors the logs for getting the credentials of the victim who have been a prey for the phished bait

The PhaaS service, video tutorials and Inline manuals provided a good ecosystem for attackers in creating phished baits and also a marketplace to buy and sell the data.

Hackshit updated to use EvenNode

As we continued our research, we identified the same group behind Hackshit updated the WebSocket link with the usage of EvenNode, a service that web hosts Node.js and Python in the cloud. The phished page was again delivered via the  “.moe” TLD at “https://a.safe.moe” using the data URI scheme to serve base64 encoded phished Google Docs page. The snippet of the decoded page is shown in Figure 21.

Figure 21: Decoded phished page using EvenNode

Detection and Remediation

Netskope customers using Netskope Active Platform can effectively block the activity to Hackshit PhaaS by leveraging a combination of custom apps and a DLP policy rule. An example of the the policy alert triggered for this action is shown in Figure 22.

Figure 22: Block policy to detecting Hackshit activity

Conclusion

The paradigm shift in cybercrime with the usage of on-demand service based model like Hackshit PhaaS provides an essence of a criminal version of software-as-a-service. The working model of the PhaaS platform which allows purchasing site login accounts and sending phished links also gives rise to an insider threat within a corporate environment. This makes it mandatory to pay extra attention while clicking any links and entering credentials into the appropriate websites. While implementing a two-factor authentication is a preventive measure, the need for educating about these attacks and promoting security awareness is always necessary. Netskope reported the Hackshit PhaaS details to all the entities whose services were being used by Hackshit

General Recommendations

Netskope recommends the following to combat cloud malware and threats:

  • Detect and remediate cloud threats using a threat-aware CASB solution like Netskope and enforce policy on usage of unsanctioned services as well as unsanctioned instances of sanctioned cloud services
  • Sample policies to enforce:
    • Scan all uploads from unmanaged devices to sanctioned cloud services for malware
    • Scan all uploads from remote devices to sanctioned cloud services for malware
    • Scan all downloads from unsanctioned cloud services for malware
    • Scan all downloads from unsanctioned instances of sanctioned cloud services for malware
    • Enforce quarantine/block actions on malware detection to reduce user impact
    • Block unsanctioned instances of sanctioned/well-known cloud services, to prevent attackers from exploiting user trust in the cloud. While this seems a little restrictive, it significantly reduces the risk of malware infiltration attempts via cloud
  • Enforce DLP policies to control files and data en route to or from your corporate environment
  • Regularly back up and turn on versioning for critical content in cloud services
  • Enable the “View known file extensions” option on Windows machines
  • Warn users to avoid executing unsigned macros and macros from an untrusted source, unless they are very sure that they are benign
  • Users should uncheck the option “Remember this action for this site for all PDF documents” in the PDF reader software
  • Whenever you receive a hyperlink, hover the mouse over it to ensure it’s legitimate
  • Users should actively track URL links added to the “Always Allow” list in PDF reader software
  • Enable Two-factor authentication for email accounts as a safety measure to prevent attackers from accessing the email account even if they know the password
  • Warn users to avoid executing any file unless they are very sure that they are benign
  • Warn users against opening untrusted attachments, regardless of their extensions or filenames
  • Keep systems and antivirus updated with the latest releases and patches
author image
Ashwin Vamshi
Ashwin Vamshi is a Security Researcher with innate interest in targeted attacks and malwares using cloud services. He is primarily focusing in identifying new attack vectors and malwares, campaigns and threat actors using ‘cloud as an attack vector.’

Stay informed!

Subscribe for the latest from the Netskope Blog