Η Microsoft tracks an ongoing phishing campaign on Office 365 which uses various methods to avoid automated analysis in attacks against corporate targets.
“The campaign uses enticing texts related to remote work, such as password updates, information conference tickets, helpdesk tickets, etc.”
Automatic redirection to valid domains
One of the evasion tactics used in this attack theftof credentials is the use of redirect URLs with the ability to trace incoming connections from sandbox environments commonly used by security researchers to gain more information about the attack.
Once one is found connection, the attacker changes sending potential victims to a phishing landing page while redirecting any automated analysis attempts to legitimate websites.
This allows the "fishermen" to make sure that the phishing pages they have created will only be visited by real users, thus drastically reducing the chance of blocking their attacks and increasing the chances of having victims.
The phishing emails used in this campaign are also vague to ensure that solutions will not be able to detect malicious messages and block them automatically before landing on the target inbox.
This campaign also creates custom subdomains for each of the targets as a way to make the phishing URLs more believable to the targets, thus increasing the success rate of the attacks.
These subdomains are created using a variety of formats, but will almost always contain the target username and domain name of their organization.
Display name patterns such as "Password Update", "Exchange Protection", "Helpdesk- #", "SharePoint" and "Projects_communications" are also used to make the malicious website look real.