Great video 0:00 intro 4:30 file inspection 6:00 code inspection 17:35 looking at the phishing attempt 19:27 curling 23:15 checking out domain info 32:35 reporting the scam 45:35 golly gee, an outro
Dear John, How come you hearted this comment, but didn't put it in the description? Timestamps are useful, and when the original creator doesn't add any, some commenters are nice enough to do it anyways, such as Stef. You hearted it. Why don't you put it in the description? I've seen some people that don't make timestamps still add viewer-provided ones with a note like "thanks to Stef for providing timestamps". Why don't you do it? Chapters are nice. pls Sincerely, ME
@@TheChriscrowder If you save the connection as an .rdp file and add enablecredsspsupport:i:0 to the bottom of the file using your favorite text editor, save it and then open it you can take a look at the accounts on the machine without trying to sign in
Episode 2 anyone? John goes hammond on this server and we get a hack the box outside hackthebox. I even got the name of your next episode! It's Hammond time! php.wnd
The absolute shock in your face when you ran into that RDP info was priceless. I know sometimes you do alot of the legwork off cam and then kinda roll through the thought process and show us a live step by step for the videos. That's what I think you were doing until that RDP moment and the sudden conflict your face showed when you seemed to think "can I/should I chase this down right now?" Truly an awesome video man.
I enjoy how your videos are always uncut (aside from the long pauses). This gives us a legitimate feel of your work and inspires us to follow these steps. As usual, thanks for the content.
Found this channel through youtube recommendation and by far one of the best recommendations I've gotten to date. I recently got into IT work and I'm looking to branch into cybersecurity as I make my way back to college. These videos have really shown me how cool and fun this stuff can be to analyze. Can't wait to start learning more about this field.
Better yet, the zip is for LA, Cali but the phone goes to a different city in Cali. Then there's the fact the street address is likely fake too given it's numbers and first two letters repeat which makes it look like a 1234 address...
My guess is that they try the credentials automatically in the background, that's why it took 20 seconds draw a box in gimp: 1. use box select 2. select region 3. right click 4. edit > stroke selection 5. ??? 6. profit
Great video, John, it was super cool to see something I deal with at work every day featured on your channel. You clearly went above and beyond with your explanations, breaking it down into all the small components to make it really easy to understand every step of the way. Thanks so much for this one in particular! 🤓
That was a fun one. I uncovered this exact one a couple years ago. Pretty clever, if you're not paying close attention I can see this one catching unsuspecting folks.
During the video I was hoping that you showed us how and where to report... and 10 sec later, you just started showing it. Great work and great video as always ! Thanks John !
Very 2000's kinda phishing attack. Funny to see it again in the open. since most of the servers don't allow these types of pages/scripts, it died soon after few years, but it spawned huge amount of email addresses back in the day! And, in the present, after soooo many years, surprisingly none of those AVs caught that. Lol.
He doesn't "advocate" hacking forward then shows the code ( 28:45 ) for an infinite while loop to spam "F-You" to the server for anyone to copy. Smooth 😎
Wouldn't doing just a while loop attract too much attention if its banging away as fast as it can ? It's like if you are attacking a system the IDS will notice weird things like this . Maybe put some random timeouts (10 - 20 seconds apart) would be a better idea. Apart from that, you'd want to randomize the data so they don't all say F-you as the password or have the same username / email etc.
You forgot to report them where they host their vm. Only one disadvantage is that they don’t give the owners information of the vm if you can show that they attack you. But at least they bring it down.
I work in cyber security and we receive emails like this almost daily. It’s super cool to analyze them and see the fake phishing login pages people create.
I've seen a few similar emails in my organisation in the last few months where they even replicated the look of the specific organisation's login page (the image background matches the custom one set by the organisation rather than the basic regular one). Thankfully our users have been shown to signal us suspicious emails.
Thank you again for doing what you do, I, as well as many others I'm sure, learn a tremendous amount from you, I'm not terribly confident in my ability to reverse engineer malware yet but simply watching you navigate Linux is enlightening.
That was holy fucking awesome informational video... definitely deserves comment, share , like and subscribe and what not.... the way you broke down each part and explained ... gold man!!! thanks a ton!!
I know nothing about CyberSec, but I know Los Angeles New York isn’t a thing…I would have IMMEDIATELY called that out (which I did while watching). That shit is shady as fuck
beautiful video. I spent alot of time today trying to learn coding for the first time HTML CSS,Java,C# . Came across this by accident. Was definitely wort watching from Start to Finish. Very Informative too!
2FA is needed indeed. But it should be noted, if you use a OTP style password fill, that too can be phished. Highly recommend using MS Authenticator (or others) which prompt on your phone, rather than prompting for a OTP.
The probable reason that the virus scanners aren't detecting it is because the organisation name is embedded in the payload... and will be different for every target.
That is exactly the content I subscribed for! loved it! I have always known about the spearfishing attack, and how it all works, but I had never seen one by myself. It was amazingly straightforward, just some base64 obfuscation and an HTML file. Thank you to the person who sent the e-mail, great stuff!
Liked the video. The whois lookup shows City of Los Angeles state New York. Surprised you missed that. Also Google maps shows that’s a Bank of America about a block from my house
A few small notes; There's a very good chance the credential harvesting page is on a legitimate website that was compromised by the attacker. I don't know that this is what happened here, but just be aware of that before going after the domain owner quite so hard. Second, it is generally far more useful to make the abuse report to the hosting provider that is hosting the malicious content, rather than the domain name registrar. Reporting to both is also fine of course, and frequently the two are the same entity but not in this case. Lastly, this sort of thing is pretty common. Any reasonably sized organization will see these sort of phishing campaigns regularly.
Very crafty. Defeated in no time with a password manager. Or 2FA. Or both. But cool to see. And a sad reminder that this does still work, because those two aforementioned things are often lacking.
Hey John, just a heads-up. First of all, awesome video, again! Thanks for sharing this. Secondly, You may want to mask the VT file hash as well. Someone silly enough, like me, for example, might type it over and see more than you wanted to share ;) Edit: I see that you masked it out later in the video, but you missed something.
Really good stuff and great use of OSINT. However, the registrar could be a victim of the phishing scam and just had their server hijacked. I know the probability of this is low as the server was setup to return fake 404 on the files present and didn’t have anything else but if this is a major operation they might be swapping servers at a certain interval 🤷♂️ Great advice too: MFA rullz and the IT department is there for a reason!
The zip code is for LA, Cali but the phone goes to a different city in Cali. Then there's the fact the street address is likely fake too given it's numbers and first two letters repeat which makes it look like a 1234 address... Given that with the 404's being fake'd I'm guessing the WHOIS is spoofed or otherwise fake too, but, innocent people could be used as a front here too just to further shroud this in layers of shade.
34:36 Well, when you zoom in, it's left-aligned, isn't it? The left side stays. And the code was indented as hell, just be thankful it wasn't actually right aligned (where left is more indented)
Hi - good stuff. I would have been tempted to put *Microsoft* as one target - it is them that is being impersonated. I look forward to hearing whether or not your reporting was successful to any degree.
27:57 Earlier in the video it did the same thing. You canceled out of it. Only with a GET request did it return a fake 404 status code. I assumed maybe the empty packet caused an error and somehow that prevented a response (wouldn't that just tell you the error?), but with actual data in the right format there's still no response, so idk why it happened.
Thanks John! Great explanation how a phishing attack works under the hood! Hope Namecheap take the necessary steps to shut down this domain and the related server and services! To catch and arrest the real "bad guys" is the bigger task in the story and depends on official entities and the will to pursue them. Waiting for you next vid .. 👍
I can really recommend LSP. Formats and highlights most scripting languages and helps with a lot of other functions, while also adding kind of a parser to scripting languages
Damn man you gave me a heart attack because last night I got an email from MS and changed my password on their site through my own doing and not a link
I've seen phishing attempts in this style quite a few times. Some of them even do some sort of automated login + 2FA harvesting. Also, the webmaster contact location of Los Angeles, New York definitely sounds like fake info, somehow.
Could be less than targeted, though. They could run a script on their own malicious script where they replace the identity with a different email from a db for that specific org. Am I going wrong about this?
Got a phishing email just like this the other day, highly targeted. Only users would be prompted to enter a variety of service logins (Gmail, outlook, icloud, etc) to log in and view a document. Couldn't strike before the server went offline after being reported.
For anyone who is wondering, this is very similar to something I would do any given day of the week as a cybersecurity analyst at a large organization. Another great video John!
Great video
0:00 intro
4:30 file inspection
6:00 code inspection
17:35 looking at the phishing attempt
19:27 curling
23:15 checking out domain info
32:35 reporting the scam
45:35 golly gee, an outro
Dear John,
How come you hearted this comment, but didn't put it in the description? Timestamps are useful, and when the original creator doesn't add any, some commenters are nice enough to do it anyways, such as Stef. You hearted it. Why don't you put it in the description? I've seen some people that don't make timestamps still add viewer-provided ones with a note like "thanks to Stef for providing timestamps". Why don't you do it? Chapters are nice. pls
Sincerely, ME
@@sodiboo THIS
@@sodiboo I think for the same reason he's still blowing and popping into his mike; He doesn't care.
@@sodiboo no chapters mean you need to watch it all 😆
Increased watch time
You already know John went and snooped around with that RDP right after this video lmao
just enjoy
I RDP'ed to it and got a login prompt. Didn't try to sign in.
@@TheChriscrowder time to crack the pass
@@TheChriscrowder If you save the connection as an .rdp file and add enablecredsspsupport:i:0 to the bottom of the file using your favorite text editor, save it and then open it you can take a look at the accounts on the machine without trying to sign in
Episode 2 anyone? John goes hammond on this server and we get a hack the box outside hackthebox. I even got the name of your next episode! It's Hammond time! php.wnd
The absolute shock in your face when you ran into that RDP info was priceless. I know sometimes you do alot of the legwork off cam and then kinda roll through the thought process and show us a live step by step for the videos. That's what I think you were doing until that RDP moment and the sudden conflict your face showed when you seemed to think "can I/should I chase this down right now?" Truly an awesome video man.
I enjoy how your videos are always uncut (aside from the long pauses). This gives us a legitimate feel of your work and inspires us to follow these steps. As usual, thanks for the content.
Found this channel through youtube recommendation and by far one of the best recommendations I've gotten to date. I recently got into IT work and I'm looking to branch into cybersecurity as I make my way back to college. These videos have really shown me how cool and fun this stuff can be to analyze. Can't wait to start learning more about this field.
Best Of luck buddy 👍
I saw this type of comments pretty much in so many videos
Don't need college for i.t. biggest lesson I learned.
This dude talks way too much. Cant watch
@@Monsizr then why are you here
Wait... The Registrant City is listed as Los Angeles, but the Registrant State is listed as NY.
Better yet, the zip is for LA, Cali but the phone goes to a different city in Cali. Then there's the fact the street address is likely fake too given it's numbers and first two letters repeat which makes it look like a 1234 address...
What's interesting too is that the registered address belongs to a medical laboratory
I can't believe this content is free. Thanks a lot man, your the best
I love how he just showed us how to spam these guys using bash, but then said “But we don’t do it”
Amazing video! It's a pretty simple but pretty well-done hashing attack. What I really loved was your call to action on reporting this kind of stuff.
I've been hoarding phishing links for months... I think it's time to pay it forward to those guys, thanks for the inspiration 🙏
in most cases they only last a few days at most before they are either taken down or flagged by GSB and the threat actors then ditch them
"You could start the Holy Wars with ViM and Emacs" Favorite John quote ever
My guess is that they try the credentials automatically in the background, that's why it took 20 seconds
draw a box in gimp:
1. use box select
2. select region
3. right click
4. edit > stroke selection
5. ???
6. profit
Great video, John, it was super cool to see something I deal with at work every day featured on your channel. You clearly went above and beyond with your explanations, breaking it down into all the small components to make it really easy to understand every step of the way. Thanks so much for this one in particular! 🤓
That was a fun one. I uncovered this exact one a couple years ago. Pretty clever, if you're not paying close attention I can see this one catching unsuspecting folks.
This might be the best TH-cam channel I've come across
During the video I was hoping that you showed us how and where to report... and 10 sec later, you just started showing it. Great work and great video as always ! Thanks John !
Very 2000's kinda phishing attack. Funny to see it again in the open. since most of the servers don't allow these types of pages/scripts, it died soon after few years, but it spawned huge amount of email addresses back in the day!
And, in the present, after soooo many years, surprisingly none of those AVs caught that. Lol.
"...nor would I want to do that on TH-cam."
He doesn't "advocate" hacking forward then shows the code ( 28:45 ) for an infinite while loop to spam "F-You" to the server for anyone to copy. Smooth 😎
Wouldn't doing just a while loop attract too much attention if its banging away as fast as it can ?
It's like if you are attacking a system the IDS will notice weird things like this .
Maybe put some random timeouts (10 - 20 seconds apart) would be a better idea.
Apart from that, you'd want to randomize the data so they don't all say F-you as the password or have the same username / email etc.
@@roadmonitoroz =_=
Totally awesome... Really enjoyed it. Thank you very much for showcasing it.
i loved that you included the documentation and reporting part!
You forgot to report them where they host their vm.
Only one disadvantage is that they don’t give the owners information of the vm if you can show that they attack you.
But at least they bring it down.
It's for stuff like this that I LOVE this channel! Incredible work!
I work in cyber security and we receive emails like this almost daily. It’s super cool to analyze them and see the fake phishing login pages people create.
“Or vscode if you’re that kind of person “
I feel personally attacked looool
Thanks for going over this email, I have to deal with stuff like this all too often and thank you for showing people on how to report this stuff.
Very creative phishing attack. great video man!!
That's the content I pay my internet bill for :D Totally love how your videos are actually informative and entertaining at the exact same time.
The 1 dislike on this video is the guy that sent the phishing email XD
I've seen a few similar emails in my organisation in the last few months where they even replicated the look of the specific organisation's login page (the image background matches the custom one set by the organisation rather than the basic regular one). Thankfully our users have been shown to signal us suspicious emails.
Best defense is a great offense!
My Python bot is thirsty for these phising attacks!
Imagine phishing scam getting spammed lol
@@gites8740 Go ahead.
@@ankitminz5872 Happens more often than you think :D
This felt like a 5minute vid. It s fun watching and learning from you so thanks 🙏🏼
this was awesome! i like how you showed how to report as well, hope to see more real world examples like this 😊
Thank you again for doing what you do, I, as well as many others I'm sure, learn a tremendous amount from you, I'm not terribly confident in my ability to reverse engineer malware yet but simply watching you navigate Linux is enlightening.
OMG, time flies when you are having fun! Didn't feel that this was a 47 min video.
That was holy fucking awesome informational video... definitely deserves comment, share , like and subscribe and what not.... the way you broke down each part and explained ... gold man!!! thanks a ton!!
This is an amazing video, we just encounted this same Phishing campain last week.
I know nothing about CyberSec, but I know Los Angeles New York isn’t a thing…I would have IMMEDIATELY called that out (which I did while watching). That shit is shady as fuck
beautiful video. I spent alot of time today trying to learn coding for the first time HTML CSS,Java,C# . Came across this by accident. Was definitely wort watching from Start to Finish. Very Informative too!
As someone working in infosec, I take down a few of those each day, they are almost all the same as the one displayed by John.
Yep, I see a bunch of these. The clever bit really is the redirect to a legit website after posting the credentials.
More of this! So fun to watch, Ty John
Thank you John. This video legitimately helped me do my job better!
thanks! John. Thanks to this video, I was able to stop the malware, when an employee got a similar phishing email. Keep up the great work!
2FA is needed indeed. But it should be noted, if you use a OTP style password fill, that too can be phished.
Highly recommend using MS Authenticator (or others) which prompt on your phone, rather than prompting for a OTP.
The probable reason that the virus scanners aren't detecting it is because the organisation name is embedded in the payload... and will be different for every target.
Possible, but some of the scanners now use regexes or other partial matches from what I understand.
That is exactly the content I subscribed for! loved it!
I have always known about the spearfishing attack, and how it all works, but I had never seen one by myself.
It was amazingly straightforward, just some base64 obfuscation and an HTML file.
Thank you to the person who sent the e-mail, great stuff!
Los Angeles, New York with a CA zip code nice lol
Watched two of your videos and definitely subscribing. Keep making great content : )
Honestly, i REALLY enjoyed that one
Really great, informative video! Thanks!
great video John, you are a cybersec inspiration!
Liked the video. The whois lookup shows City of Los Angeles state New York. Surprised you missed that. Also Google maps shows that’s a Bank of America about a block from my house
VSauce be like
It's returning a 404...
Or is it ?
JSauce
A few small notes; There's a very good chance the credential harvesting page is on a legitimate website that was compromised by the attacker. I don't know that this is what happened here, but just be aware of that before going after the domain owner quite so hard.
Second, it is generally far more useful to make the abuse report to the hosting provider that is hosting the malicious content, rather than the domain name registrar. Reporting to both is also fine of course, and frequently the two are the same entity but not in this case.
Lastly, this sort of thing is pretty common. Any reasonably sized organization will see these sort of phishing campaigns regularly.
The target would be outlook's login, it's literally targeting the Microsoft office login, since that's where it /redirects/ to.
Great video. I've seen this phishing attempt. Cool to see the deep dive.
Was great to see you reporting it. I’ve done similar for postal service scams which are rife in the UK
Very crafty. Defeated in no time with a password manager. Or 2FA. Or both.
But cool to see. And a sad reminder that this does still work, because those two aforementioned things are often lacking.
Hey John, just a heads-up. First of all, awesome video, again! Thanks for sharing this. Secondly, You may want to mask the VT file hash as well. Someone silly enough, like me, for example, might type it over and see more than you wanted to share ;)
Edit: I see that you masked it out later in the video, but you missed something.
Yup I was just about to write this when i found your comment, once it is on VT it is public :) and can be harvested
Ouu please explain
With target they meant who the phishing attack was trying to impersonate john
This is all fascinating to me and makes me wish i had stuck with it back in the day. I haven't even used Linux in years.
Really good stuff and great use of OSINT. However, the registrar could be a victim of the phishing scam and just had their server hijacked.
I know the probability of this is low as the server was setup to return fake 404 on the files present and didn’t have anything else but if this is a major operation they might be swapping servers at a certain interval 🤷♂️
Great advice too: MFA rullz and the IT department is there for a reason!
The zip code is for LA, Cali but the phone goes to a different city in Cali. Then there's the fact the street address is likely fake too given it's numbers and first two letters repeat which makes it look like a 1234 address... Given that with the 404's being fake'd I'm guessing the WHOIS is spoofed or otherwise fake too, but, innocent people could be used as a front here too just to further shroud this in layers of shade.
@@zoes17the state says New York, there’s no Los Angeles New York first of all
Wow great content! Very informative! I would love to see more videos like this!
I really liked the reporting part! It'd be awesome if you updated us when they respond
i really love these password harvesting sites cuz jokes on you I never get my password right on the first try
I don't regret spending my 47 minutes on this!!
reporting stuff takes more time than reverse engineering it!!
Los Angeles, NY?
This was awesome! Please do some more of these, Great video
This was trivial but also extremely awesome
The irony is not lost me. Using a Microsoft service to harvest Microsoft user data. That is "flipping the bird" to Microsoft big time.
I got this recently, and I had alot of fun messing around with it and changing the post request address
I also reported the domain
34:36 Well, when you zoom in, it's left-aligned, isn't it? The left side stays. And the code was indented as hell, just be thankful it wasn't actually right aligned (where left is more indented)
Hi - good stuff. I would have been tempted to put *Microsoft* as one target - it is them that is being impersonated. I look forward to hearing whether or not your reporting was successful to any degree.
Real followers gonna skip the updated videos and see the 3 - 5 years old videos from john
27:57 Earlier in the video it did the same thing. You canceled out of it. Only with a GET request did it return a fake 404 status code. I assumed maybe the empty packet caused an error and somehow that prevented a response (wouldn't that just tell you the error?), but with actual data in the right format there's still no response, so idk why it happened.
Thanks John! Great explanation how a phishing attack works under the hood! Hope Namecheap take the necessary steps to shut down this domain and the related server and services! To catch and arrest the real "bad guys" is the bigger task in the story and depends on official entities and the will to pursue them. Waiting for you next vid .. 👍
I can really recommend LSP. Formats and highlights most scripting languages and helps with a lot of other functions, while also adding kind of a parser to scripting languages
Don't forget to add this to the malware analysis playlist
Honestly, I really dig this video. Really puts into perspective the defensive and investigative side of things.
Damn man you gave me a heart attack because last night I got an email from MS and changed my password on their site through my own doing and not a link
I've seen phishing attempts in this style quite a few times. Some of them even do some sort of automated login + 2FA harvesting. Also, the webmaster contact location of Los Angeles, New York definitely sounds like fake info, somehow.
Registrant from Los Angeles NY?
This video makes me glad that i never ever open links from emails. And second - i never ever remember my password first try and i always use 2 factor
Los Angeles NY??? (Though 90034 is Culver City CA)
28:30 I’m guessing they have spam filtering for this type of thing?
That 20s delay after posting with the fake payload was actually programmed, as seen in 32:50 for example, no?
Could be less than targeted, though.
They could run a script on their own malicious script where they replace the identity with a different email from a db for that specific org.
Am I going wrong about this?
They might be harvesting LinkedIn or Hunter data
This video is INSANE! I love this very much
maybe it took 20 seconds due to Azure cold boot? Cloud Functions typically scale down when there's no traffic.
The city and state don't match on the domain. Los Angeles isn't in NY. Prob completely fake creds leading to a burner account.
Got a phishing email just like this the other day, highly targeted. Only users would be prompted to enter a variety of service logins (Gmail, outlook, icloud, etc) to log in and view a document. Couldn't strike before the server went offline after being reported.
i see 30 minutes of video, because is the best video i ever seen
Awesome stuff John, always enjoy your videos
All .us domain names can not use privacy or proxy data for the owner(s) that is not to say it can not be fake info.
I really love your videos, just the detail paired with great Explantation :-)
Keep going!!!
For anyone who is wondering, this is very similar to something I would do any given day of the week as a cybersecurity analyst at a large organization. Another great video John!
15:27 is comment in code something you add or it is from fake outlook page creator
31:50 To be fair, this is undetectable. How is antimalware supposed to know that a 404 status code is actually a malicious endpoint?
When someone like John reports the endpoint as malicious
Well done John!