We recently wrote about the discovery of India’s cyberattack infrastructure — in Norway.
Pakistan appears to be using similar spearphishing tactics against India. ThreatConnect is reporting that they uncovered Pakistani spearphishing artifacts in a small subnet hosted in the United States. The researchers found spearphishing bait designed to entice Indian victims into clicking together with its malware payloads. One example of the bait, a fake pension attachment which had all the attributes of a real pension memorandum of record, shown below.
ThreatConnect speculates that this 12 page document was customized to deceive specific individuals. Of course, the document was malicious and delivered its command and control malware upon opening.
Another piece of bait — a report on Pakistani handling of the bin Laden matter:
ThreatConnect’s cyber detective work identified the likely technical mastermind:
ThreatConnect observed:
In light of the recent revelation of Indian involvement in the targeting of Telenor, it is critical for us to consider the borderless nature of cyber espionage and to understand how regional cyber conflicts can spill across geographies and affect critical commercial business operations.
At Iconix, our goal is to make the spearphishing vector less effective. Spearphishers deceive people into making bad email decisions that compromise security. IT needs to help employees make better email processing decisions. That is where SP Guard comes into play. Using SP Guard, IT can determine a list of trusted senders and provide this information to staff in a simple and highly effective manner.
You can contact us at 408-727-6342,ext 3 or use our online form.