Netskope Threat Research Labs recently found an Amazon-themed phishing page hosted by Azure App Service. The phishing page was created with an intent to steal Amazon credentials and other sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) from the victims. In an earlier post, phishing in the public cloud, we detailed phishing campaigns that used public cloud hosting services to serve up parts of the attack. Here, the entirety of the attack is hosted solely in Azure. This post describes how the phishing page was created, highlighting how easily attackers can use public cloud services to create convincing phishing pages. It also outlines how the attack looks to the victim and provides some more details about the attacker.
Hosting Phishing Pages on Azure App Service
Azure App Service is a platform that enables users to easily deploy websites. The attacker here used Azure App Service both to create the phishing web form used to collect data from the victims and to create the database used to store the data. The following are a few of the reasons that the attacker might have chosen Azure App Service.
- The low cost of hosting the phishing site. A new Azure subscription currently includes offerings like 12 months of free services and a $200 credit. These enable an attacker to host a phishing page at no cost to them.
- Microsoft SSL certificates and domains. A site hosted in Azure App Service will be hosted from a Microsoft domain and have a Microsoft-issued SSL certificate. Both of these tend not to arouse suspicion in victims. Furthermore, the Microsoft certificates and domains tend to help attackers evade traditional security solutions as well.
- Accessibility. All that is required to sign up for Azure is a valid credit card number; this makes it easy to create an account and setup a phishing page.
- Ease of deployment. If a site gets shut down, it is very easy to spin it up again in a new account.
While these points were written specifically about Azure, they also apply to the other major cloud service providers, such as AWS, GCP, and Alibaba. We expect that all of these services will be used by attackers to create similar phishing sites.
Netskope Detection
Netskope for Web detects and blocks the phishing page as shown in Figure 1.