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AMIDST MGM, CAESAR'S INCIDENTS, ATTACKERS FOCUS ON LUXURY HOTELS

A fast-growing cyber campaign solely takes aim at luxury hotel and resort
chains, using security-disruptive tactics to spread info-stealing malware.
Elizabeth Montalbano
Contributor, Dark Reading
September 26, 2023
Source: Anna Berkut via Alamy Stock Photo
PDF


Even as the effects of the show-stopping cyberattacks on MGM Grand and Caesars
are still being felt, attackers continue to target the hospitality industry with
an active phishing campaign aimed at spreading info-stealing malware. The
offensive uses social-engineering tactics similar to the ones that ultimately
crippled the resort-casinos this month.



The campaign, discovered by researchers at Cofense Intelligence, leverages
reconnaissance emails and instant messages to bait employees at luxury resorts
and hotel chains into a response, according to a Cofense blog post published
Sept. 26. Once the threat actors receive a response to the initial email, they
will then follow up with phishing messages that leverage several methods known
to disrupt email security analysis and secure email gateways (SEGs), so that the
messages reach intended targets. These tactics include the use of trusted cloud
domains in the emails, password-protected archives, and executable files that
are so large they can disrupt analysis, according to the report.

"From the reconnaissance email all the way to the malicious payload, this
campaign and its infection chain are both highly sophisticated and
well-thought-out by the threat actors," Cofense cyber threat intelligence
analyst Dylan Duncan wrote in the post.

This attention to detail is reflective in "the success of these emails reaching
intended targets," with a notable uptick in the campaign through August and into
September "at an alarming rate," he added. Indeed, 85% of the phishing emails
observed in the campaign have been sent in the last 60 days, with September
showing a higher incidence of messages than August, according to Cofense.




USING CLOUD SERVICES TO BOOST LEGITIMACY

Threat actors make initial contact by sending an email to luxury hospitality
chains and services using what they believe is a company email address. In one
case, in a message that targeted a reservation email address, the threat actors
purported to be a customer seeking a special medical request for their existing
reservation.



These first messages don't contain malicious content, but are simply used to
verify that the target email account is live. If the recipient takes the bait,
the follow-up message from attackers arrives on the same day; but this one is a
phishing email with a similar lure to the reconnaissance email, giving the
campaign legitimacy.

"The lures all warrant some sort of response from the targeted hospitality
organization and are most likely very similar to what the employee is accustomed
to seeing, such as a booking request or reservation change," Duncan wrote.



The emails include an infection URL hosted on a trusted cloud domain — such as
Google Drive, Dropbox, or DiscordApp — from which a victim downloads a
password-protected archive that contains malicious files. Fifty-eight percent of
the links observed by Cofense were Google Drive files, while 49% of the archives
were .ZIP files.

And while the abuse of Google Drive and other hosted password-protected archive
platforms is a common tactic of threat actors in the phishing game to bypass
security, there are other methods that the actors use to throw security
researchers off the trail. For instance, as mentioned, one trick is to use a
large file size to deliver malicious executables, which are in the range of
around 600MB to 1GB. This disrupts analysis because most sandboxes and other
analysis tools are limited in the size of files that can be scanned, he said.


THE ULTIMATE GOAL IS CREDENTIAL THEFT

The ultimate goal of the campaign is to steal employees' login information for
various applications used on the corporate system, and, in some cases, deliver
secondary payloads. Stealers deployed by the campaign are from five known
malware families — RedLine Stealer, Vidar Stealer, Stealc, Lumma Stealer, and
Spidey Bot.

In fact, the threat actors behind RedLine and Vidar recently were seen pivoting
to ransomware using similar tactics for delivering their stealers, demonstrating
how easily a phishing campaign can lead to a full-blown ransomware attack like
the ones that recently took down MGM and Caesars. Cofense did not elaborate on
any known successful attacks.

The phishing campaign also has a high chance of success, not just because of how
many messages it lands, but also because the targets are likely not especially
tech-savvy, Duncan says.

"The targets of these campaigns are not likely to be cybersecurity
professionals, but rather just your every-day user that is specialized in areas
fit for their job," he says.

In this case, the most practical defense a likely campaign target can employ is
to educate these employees on general phishing concepts, as well as inform them
of the existence of malicious campaigns like the one discovered by Cofense,
Duncan says.

On the technical front, organizations should block downloads from sites being
abused by the campaign that their business does not typically support, "such as
blocking downloads from Google Drive or DiscordApp if the company does not
conduct legitimate business on those sites," he adds.

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