Last year, Netskope Threat Research Labs discovered Hackshit Phishing as a Service (PhaaS) platform that recorded the victims credentials via websocket service hosted in Amazon S3. Eventually, after reporting the attack elements to all the entities, the services were stopped.
Now, fast forward to 2018, while researching the latest phished baits and trends, we observed the resurgence of Hackshit Phishing as a Service (PhaaS) platform reusing the same attack elements as reported earlier. We uncovered the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) like the Platform as a Service (PaaS) app for developing, deploying and running the code and the file-sharing platform for spreading the phished baits from secured websites.
Netskope for Web can proactively protect customers from credential theft by creating custom applications and a policy to block all the activities related to Hackshit PhaaS.
Hackshit PhaaS allowed its users to record the victim credentials via WebSockets using base64 encoded secure (HTTPS) phished baits or using decoy PDF documents with an embedded link. Initially, all the phished baits were delivered from secure (HTTPS) websites with top-level domains with the “moe” top-level domain (TLD). Later, we observed several phished baits served from secure (HTTPS) websites with top-level domains (TLD) namely “moe”, “tn”, “cat”, “wtf”, and “space”. The phished baits we observed were not encoded with base64. They were disguised and designed to mimic login pages of popular services like Microsoft, Google Docs, Dropbox, and DocuSign for obtaining the user credentials.
Analysis of the Phished baits
The credentials entered in the phished baits mentioned above are sent to the attacker via WebSocket to the URL’s https://pod[.]logshit[.]com, https://pod-1[.]logshit[.]com and https://hspod-1[.]eu-1[.]evennode.com. These WebSocket services were hosted and deployed on a Platform as a service named Evennode. All the URLs resolved to the IP address 52.18.91[.]8. At the time of analysis, the IP was registered to Amazon S3 and resolved to ec2-52-18-91-8.eu-west-1.compute[.]amazonaws.com.The phished baits we observed is shown in Figure 1.