In a complaint filed Wednesday, the tech giant accused “a cybercriminal group in China” of selling “phishing for dummies” kits. The kits help unsavvy fraudsters easily “execute a large-scale phishing campaign,” tricking hordes of unsuspecting people into “disclosing sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or banking information, often by impersonating well-known brands, government agencies, or even people the victim knows.”
These branded “Lighthouse” kits offer two versions of software, depending on whether bad actors want to launch SMS and e-commerce scams. “Members may subscribe to weekly, monthly, seasonal, annual, or permanent licenses,” Google alleged. Kits include “hundreds of templates for fake websites, domain set-up tools for those fake websites, and other features designed to dupe victims into believing they are entering sensitive information on a legitimate website.”
Google’s filing said the scams often begin with a text claiming that a toll fee is overdue or a small fee must be paid to redeliver a package. Other times they appear as ads—sometimes even Google ads, until Google detected and suspended accounts—luring victims by mimicking popular brands. Anyone who clicks will be redirected to a website to input sensitive information; the sites often claim to accept payments from trusted wallets like Google Pay.
In 2025, the construction industry stands at the crossroads of digital transformation and evolving cybersecurity risks, making it a prime target for threat actors. Cyber adversaries, including ransomware operators, organized cybercriminal networks, and state-sponsored APT groups from countries such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, are increasingly focusing their attacks on the building and construction sector.
These actors exploit the industry’s growing dependence on vulnerable IoT‑enabled heavy machinery, Building Information Modeling (BIM) systems, and cloud‑based project management platforms.
Ransomware campaigns designed to disrupt project timelines, supply chain attacks exploiting third‑party software and equipment vendors, and social engineering schemes targeting on‑site personnel pose substantial operational and financial risks. Compounding this, data privacy mandates and regulatory scrutiny have intensified globally, pressing construction companies to implement robust cybersecurity measures.
In this two-part series, Rapid7 is looking at the threats the construction industry faces, how threat actors are entering their networks, and the most common vulnerabilities construction industry security professionals should remediate now.
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Initial access and data leaks
The construction sector faces escalating cyber threats as rapid digital transformation and heavy reliance on third-party vendors expose firms to new vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals increasingly target construction companies for initial access and data leaks, exploiting weak security practices, outdated legacy systems, and widespread use of cloud-based project management tools. Attackers commonly employ phishing email messages, compromised credentials, and supply chain attacks, taking advantage of insufficient employee training and lax vendor risk management.
Notably, gaining initial access to a corporate network can be resource-intensive, prompting many threat actors to seek more accessible routes: purchasing access from underground forums where intermediaries and brokers sell credentials to previously breached networks across all industries, including construction. Access types traded, such as VPN, RDP, SSH, Citrix, SMTP, and FTP, are priced based on the target’s size and network complexity.
Once inside, cybercriminals leverage interconnected systems to move laterally and exfiltrate valuable data, including blueprints, contracts, financial records, and personal information. The complex, collaborative nature of construction projects and the frequent exchange of sensitive documents amplify the risk, making the sector a prime target for corporate espionage, financial gain, and extortion through ransomware. This evolving threat landscape underscores the urgent need for robust cybersecurity measures and comprehensive vendor risk management within the industry.
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Construction company network access for sale on the dark web
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VPN/RDP/Cpanel access to a construction company for sale on the dark web
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Social engineering and phishing campaigns
Social engineering and phishing campaigns are particularly effective in the building and construction industry as attackers exploit the industry’s workflow and human vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals frequently use phishing emails, SMS messages, and phone calls to impersonate project managers, suppliers, or executives. These communications often appear urgent, requesting immediate payment, sensitive information, or login credentials, making them difficult for busy staff to ignore.
Common attack vectors
Vendor impersonation: Attackers pose as legitimate suppliers to request changes in payment details or deliver fake invoices, exploiting the sector’s reliance on a broad network of subcontractors and vendors.
Executive impersonation (“CEO fraud”): Criminals spoof senior management to pressure employees into transferring funds or divulging confidential information.
Malicious attachments and links: Phishing messages often contain fake contracts, blueprints, or project documents, which, when opened, compromise credentials or deploy malware.
Compromised trusted platforms: Attackers exploit open redirects or compromised accounts on construction management tools to distribute phishing links that bypass basic email security checks.
Due to several unique operational challenges, the building and construction sector is particularly vulnerable to social engineering and phishing attacks. A dispersed and mobile workforce, with employees often working remotely or across multiple job sites, makes it challenging to verify unexpected requests or consult with IT and security teams in real time.
The urgency to complete high-value transactions under tight project deadlines can encourage employees to bypass verification procedures and overlook warning signs of suspicious communications. Additionally, the sector’s complex supply chains, which involve frequent interactions with unfamiliar subcontractors, provide ample opportunities for attackers to infiltrate ongoing conversations unnoticed.
This risk is compounded by varying levels of cybersecurity awareness among employees, particularly in smaller firms where consistent training is less common. These factors make the industry an attractive target for attackers and highlight the critical need for enhanced employee awareness, rigorous verification processes, and sector-specific cybersecurity measures.
Supply chain and third‑party risks
The construction sector’s dependence on a vast network of subcontractors, vendors, and technology providers has intensified its exposure to supply chain and third‑party cyber threats. Construction projects often involve dozens, sometimes hundreds, of different partners, each bringing their systems and security practices to the table. Unlike more centralized industries, construction companies rarely have complete visibility or control over the cybersecurity standards of every third party involved.
This lack of uniformity creates significant blind spots that attackers can exploit. For example, a breach within a third-party software update or a compromised equipment supplier can quickly propagate throughout an entire project, causing costly delays, data loss, or operational paralysis.
With tight deadlines and complex, geographically dispersed operations, construction firms may deprioritize cybersecurity vetting in favor of speed and cost, further compounding their risk. Effective mitigation now demands ongoing risk assessments, precise contractual cybersecurity requirements for all partners, real-time monitoring, and a collaborative approach to incident response, ensuring vulnerabilities are identified and addressed before they can impact critical projects.
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Emerging threats: The Internet of Things (IoT) and Building Information Modeling (BIM)
The rapid adoption of IoT‑enabled machinery and Building Information Modeling (BIM) has transformed the construction landscape, enhancing efficiency and collaboration across project teams. However, these advances have also created new and unique points of vulnerability.
The sector’s use of connected devices such as smart cranes, on-site sensors, and drones often operate in environments where cybersecurity is not traditionally a primary concern, and where devices may be physically accessible to outsiders or not consistently updated. Many IoT devices lack built-in security features, making them easy entry points for cyberattacks that could disrupt operations or threaten worker safety.
Similarly, BIM platforms that centralize and share sensitive design and project data are now high-value targets, as a single compromise can reveal blueprints, project timelines, and operational details to attackers. Construction firms are particularly at risk because project sites frequently change, IT resources may be stretched thin, and digital assets are constantly being moved and accessed by different parties.
Protecting these new technologies requires a shift in mindset: from viewing cybersecurity as a back-office concern to treating it as an essential component of on-site and digital operations, including secure device management, strong access controls, regular updates, and robust encryption practices.
Key threats and vulnerable points in IoT and BIM for construction:
IoT device vulnerabilities:
Weak authentication: Many IoT devices use default or weak passwords, making unauthorized access easier.
Unpatched firmware: Devices often lack regular updates, leaving known vulnerabilities open to exploitation.
Physical access risks: Construction sites are less secure environments, allowing attackers to tamper with or steal devices.
Insecure communication protocols: Data sent between IoT devices and central systems may be unencrypted or poorly secured, exposing sensitive information.
BIM threats: Centralized data breaches: BIM platforms hold all project data in one place so that a single breach can expose blueprints, schedules, and operational details.
Unauthorized access: Weak access controls or shared credentials can let unauthorized users download, alter, or leak sensitive project files.
Third-party collaboration risks: Multiple subcontractors or vendors may have access to BIM, increasing the risk of compromised accounts or insider threats.
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Taking proactive steps to enhance cybersecurity
As the building and construction industry digitalizes, strengthening cybersecurity has become a business-critical priority. The following strategies address the sector’s unique challenges and offer a roadmap for reducing cyber risk.
Elevate cybersecurity to a core business priority
Historically, cybersecurity has been an afterthought in many construction firms. To change this, leadership must treat cybersecurity as essential to project delivery and business continuity. This requires investing in dedicated IT security staff, integrating cybersecurity into board-level discussions, and establishing clear policies for digital risk management throughout the organization.
Secure the digital supply chain
Given the sector’s reliance on a complex network of subcontractors and vendors, assessing and strengthening supply chain security is crucial. Firms should require vendors to meet baseline cybersecurity standards, conduct regular audits of third-party security practices, and ensure that project documents and data are shared through secure and encrypted channels. Construction companies can reduce the risk of supply chain-based attacks by holding all partners to strong security protocols.
Upgrade and harden legacy systems
Outdated software and systems remain prime targets for cybercriminals. Construction companies must thoroughly assess their IT environments, identify and replace unsupported or vulnerable technologies, and maintain a regular schedule of software updates and patching. Modern firewalls and endpoint protection further help to close critical security gaps.
Protect IoT devices and smart technology
Securing these devices is essential with the rapid adoption of IoT sensors, connected machinery, and advanced project management platforms. This means changing default passwords, disabling unnecessary services, and keeping IoT devices on networks separate from core business systems. Ongoing monitoring for unauthorized access or unusual activity helps to detect and respond to threats targeting these new endpoints.
Foster a security-aware culture
Human error is still a leading cause of cyber incidents, so regular cybersecurity training should be mandatory for all employees and contractors. Staff should be equipped to recognize phishing attempts, follow secure password practices, and report security incidents. Construction firms can strengthen their defense by building a culture where everyone understands their role in protecting digital assets.
Safeguard sensitive data and intellectual property
Protecting sensitive information such as blueprints, bids, client data, and proprietary designs is crucial. Data should be encrypted at rest and in transit, with strict access controls and permissions. Regular data backups and recovery testing are also important, along with using secure platforms for managing and sharing documents. These measures help prevent unauthorized access, data loss, and reputational harm.
As the industry reckons with its expanding digital footprint, understanding and mitigating the unique tactics and motivations of these threat actors in 2025 is prudent and imperative for ensuring project continuity, workforce safety, and reputational resilience.
In the concluding installment of this two-part series, Rapid7 will look at how ransomware actors exploit many of the same weaknesses mentioned here. Stay tuned.
A new meeting on your calendar or a new attack vector?
It starts innocently enough. A new meeting appears in your Google calendar and the subject seems ordinary, perhaps even urgent: “Security Update Briefing,”“Your Account Verification Meeting,” or “Important Notice Regarding Benefits.” You assume you missed this invitation in your overloaded email inbox, and click “Yes” to accept.
Unfortunately, calendar invites have become an overlooked delivery mechanism for social engineering and phishing campaigns. Attackers are increasingly abusing the .ics file format, a universally trusted, text-based standard to embed malicious links, redirect victims to fake meeting pages, or seed events directly into users’ calendars without interaction.
Because calendar files often bypass traditional email and attachment defenses, they offer a low-friction attack path into corporate environments.
Defenders should treat .ics files as active content, tighten client defaults, and raise awareness that even legitimate-looking calendar invites can carry hidden risk.
The underestimated threat of .ics files
The iCalendar (.ics) format is one of those technologies we all rely on without thinking. It’s text-based, universally supported, and designed for interoperability between Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple, and countless other clients.
Each invite contains a structured list of fields like SUMMARY, LOCATION, DESCRIPTION, and ATTACH. Within these, attackers have found an opportunity: they can embed URLs, malicious redirects, or even base64-encoded content. The result is a file that appears completely legitimate to a calendar client, yet quietly delivers the attacker’s message, link, or payload.
Because calendar files are plain text, they easily slip through traditional security controls. Most email gateways and endpoint filters don’t treat .ics files with the same scrutiny as executables or macros. And since users expect to receive meeting invites, often from outside their organization, it’s an ideal format for social engineering.
How threat actors abuse the invite
Over the past year, researchers have observed a rise in campaigns abusing calendar invites to phish credentials, deliver malware, or trick users into joining fake meetings. These attacks often look mundane but rely on subtle manipulation:
The lure: A professional-looking meeting name and sender, sometimes spoofed from a legitimate organization.
The link: A URL hidden in the DESCRIPTION or LOCATION field, often pointing to a fake login page or document-sharing site.
The timing: Invites scheduled within minutes, creating urgency (“Your access expires in 15 minutes — join now”).
The automation: Calendar clients that automatically add external invites, ensuring the trap appears directly in the user’s daily schedule.
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Example of where some of the malicious components would reside in the .ics file
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It’s clever, low-effort social engineering leveraging trust in a system built for collaboration.
The “invisible click” problem
The real danger of malicious calendar invites isn’t just the link inside, it’s the automatic delivery mechanism. In certain configurations, Outlook and Google Calendar will automatically process .ics attachments and create tentative events, even if the user never opens or even receives the email. That means the malicious link is now part of the user’s trusted interface with their calendar.
This bypasses the usual cognitive warning signs. The email might look suspicious, but the event reminder popping up later? That feels like part of your day. It’s phishing that moves in quietly and waits.
Why traditional defenses miss it
Security tooling has historically focused on attachments that execute code or scripts. By contrast, .ics files are plain text and standards-based, so they don’t inherently appear dangerous. Many detection engines ignore or minimally parse them.
Attackers exploit that gap. They rely on the fact that few organizations monitor for BEGIN:VCALENDAR content or inspect calendar metadata for embedded URLs. Once delivered, the file can bypass filters, land in the user’s calendar, and lead to a high-confidence click.
What defenders can do now
Defending against calendar-based attacks begins with recognizing that these are not edge cases anymore. They’re a natural evolution of phishing where user convenience becomes the delivery mechanism.
Here are a few pragmatic steps every organization should consider:
Treat .ics files like active content. Configure email filters and attachment scanners to inspect calendar files for URLs, base64-encoded data, or ATTACH fields.
Review calendar client defaults. Disable automatic addition of external events when possible, or flag external organizers with clear warnings.
Sanitize incoming invites. Content disarm and reconstruction (CDR) tools can strip out or neutralize dangerous links embedded in calendar fields.
Raise awareness among users. Train employees to verify unexpected invites — especially those urging immediate action or containing meeting links they didn’t anticipate. Employees can also follow the helpful advice in this Google Support article.
Use strong identity protection. Multi-factor authentication and conditional access policies mitigate the impact if a phishing link successfully steals credentials.
These steps don’t eliminate the threat, but they significantly increase friction for attackers and their malware.
A quiet evolution in social engineering campaigns
Malicious calendar invites represent a subtle yet telling shift in attacker behavior: blending into legitimate business processes rather than breaking them. In the same way that invoice-themed phishing emails once exploited trust in accounting workflows, .ics abuse leverages the quiet reliability of collaboration tools.
As organizations continue to integrate calendars with chat, cloud storage, and video platforms, the attack surface will only expand. Links inside invites will lead to files in shared drives, authentication requests, and embedded meeting credentials. These are all opportunities for exploitation.
Rethinking trust in everyday workflows
Defenders often focus on the extraordinary like zero days, ransomware binaries, and new exploits. Yet the most effective attacks remain the simplest: exploiting human trust in ordinary digital habits. A calendar invite feels harmless and that’s exactly why it works.
The next time an unexpected meeting appears in your calendar, it might be more than just a double-booking. It could be a reminder that security isn’t only about blocking malware, but about questioning what we assume to be safe.
This site turns your URL into something sketchy-looking.
For example, www.schneier.com becomes https://cheap-bitcoin.online/firewall-snatcher/cipher-injector/phishing_sniffer_tool.html?form=inject&host=spoof&id=bb1bc121¶meter=inject&payload=%28function%28%29%7B+return+%27+hi+%27.trim%28%29%3B+%7D%29%28%29%3B&port=spoof.
A few years ago, scammers invented a new phishing email. They would claim to have hacked your computer, turned your webcam on, and videoed you watching porn or having sex. BuzzFeed has an article talking about a “shockingly realistic” variant, which includes photos of you and your house—more specific information.
The article contains “steps you can take to figure out if it’s a scam,” but omits the first and most fundamental piece of advice: If the hacker had incriminating video about you, they would show you a clip. Just a taste, not the worst bits so you had to worry about how bad it could be, but something. If the hacker doesn’t show you any video, they don’t have any video. Everything else is window dressing.
I remember when this scam was first invented. I calmed several people who were legitimately worried with that one fact.
There’s a new cybersecurity awareness campaign: Take9. The idea is that people—you, me, everyone—should just pause for nine seconds and think more about the link they are planning to click on, the file they are planning to download, or whatever it is they are planning to share.
There’s a website—of course—and a video, well-produced and scary. But the campaign won’t do much to improve cybersecurity. The advice isn’t reasonable, it won’t make either individuals or nations appreciably safer, and it deflects blame from the real causes of our cyberspace insecurities.
First, the advice is not realistic. A nine-second pause is an eternity in something as routine as using your computer or phone. Try it; use a timer. Then think about how many links you click on and how many things you forward or reply to. Are we pausing for nine seconds after every text message? Every Slack ping? Does the clock reset if someone replies midpause? What about browsing—do we pause before clicking each link, or after every page loads? The logistics quickly become impossible. I doubt they tested the idea on actual users.
Second, it largely won’t help. The industry should know because we tried it a decade ago. “Stop. Think. Connect.” was an awarenesscampaign from 2016, by the Department of Homeland Security—this was before CISA—and the National Cybersecurity Alliance. The message was basically the same: Stop and think before doing anything online. It didn’t work then, either.
Take9’s website says, “Science says: In stressful situations, wait 10 seconds before responding.” The problem with that is that clicking on a link is not a stressful situation. It’s normal, one that happens hundreds of times a day. Maybe you can train a person to count to 10 before punching someone in a bar but not before opening an attachment.
And there is no basis in science for it. It’s a folk belief, all over the Internet but with no actual research behind it—like the five-second rule when you drop food on the floor. In emotionally charged contexts, most people are already overwhelmed, cognitively taxed, and not functioning in a space where rational interruption works as neatly as this advice suggests.
Pausing Adds Little
Pauses help us break habits. If we are clicking, sharing, linking, downloading, and connecting out of habit, a pause to break that habit works. But the problem here isn’t habit alone. The problem is that people aren’t able to differentiate between something legitimate and an attack.
The Take9 website says that nine seconds is “time enough to make a better decision,” but there’s no use telling people to stop and think if they don’t know what to think about after they’ve stopped. Pause for nine seconds and… do what? Take9 offers no guidance. It presumes people have the cognitive tools to understand the myriad potential attacks and figure out which one of the thousands of Internet actions they take is harmful. If people don’t have the right knowledge, pausing for longer—even a minute—will do nothing to add knowledge.
The three-part suspicion, cognition, and automaticity model (SCAM) is one way to think about this. The first is lack of knowledge—not knowing what’s risky and what isn’t. The second is habits: people doing what they always do. And third, using flawed mental shortcuts, like believing PDFs to be safer than Microsoft Word documents, or that mobile devices are safer than computers for opening suspicious emails.
These pathways don’t always occur in isolation; sometimes they happen together or sequentially. They can influence each other or cancel each other out. For example, a lack of knowledge can lead someone to rely on flawed mental shortcuts, while those same shortcuts can reinforce that lack of knowledge. That’s why meaningful behavioral change requires more than just a pause; it needs cognitive scaffolding and system designs that account for these dynamic interactions.
A successful awareness campaign would do more than tell people to pause. It would guide them through a two-step process. First trigger suspicion, motivating them to look more closely. Then, direct their attention by telling them what to look at and how to evaluate it. When both happen, the person is far more likely to make a better decision.
This means that pauses need to be context specific. Think about email readers that embed warnings like “EXTERNAL: This email is from an address outside your organization” or “You have not received an email from this person before.” Those are specifics, and useful. We could imagine an AI plug-in that warns: “This isn’t how Bruce normally writes.” But of course, there’s an arms race in play; the bad guys will use these systems to figure out how to bypass them.
This is all hard. The old cues aren’t there anymore. Current phishing attacks have evolved from those older Nigerian scams filled with grammar mistakes and typos. Text message, voice, or video scams are even harder to detect. There isn’t enough context in a text message for the system to flag. In voice or video, it’s much harder to trigger suspicion without disrupting the ongoing conversation. And all the false positives, when the system flags a legitimate conversation as a potential scam, work against people’s own intuition. People will just start ignoring their own suspicions, just as most people ignore all sorts of warnings that their computer puts in their way.
Even if we do this all well and correctly, we can’t make people immune to social engineering. Recently, both cyberspace activist Cory Doctorow and security researcher Troy Hunt—two people who you’d expect to be excellent scam detectors—got phished. In both cases, it was just the right message at just the right time.
It’s even worse if you’re a large organization. Security isn’t based on the average employee’s ability to detect a malicious email; it’s based on the worst person’s inability—the weakest link. Even if awareness raises the average, it won’t help enough.
Don’t Place Blame Where It Doesn’t Belong
Finally, all of this is bad public policy. The Take9 campaign tells people that they can stop cyberattacks by taking a pause and making a better decision. What’s not said, but certainly implied, is that if they don’t take that pause and don’t make those better decisions, then they’re to blame when the attack occurs.
That’s simply not true, and its blame-the-user message is one of the worst mistakes our industry makes. Stop trying to fix the user. It’s not the user’s fault if they click on a link and it infects their system. It’s not their fault if they plug in a strange USB drive or ignore a warning message that they can’t understand. It’s not even their fault if they get fooled by a look-alike bank website and lose their money. The problem is that we’ve designed these systems to be so insecure that regular, nontechnical people can’t use them with confidence. We’re using security awareness campaigns to cover up bad system design. Or, as security researcher Angela Sasse first said in 1999: “Users are not the enemy.”
We wouldn’t accept that in other parts of our lives. Imagine Take9 in other contexts. Food service: “Before sitting down at a restaurant, take nine seconds: Look in the kitchen, maybe check the temperature of the cooler, or if the cooks’ hands are clean.” Aviation: “Before boarding a plane, take nine seconds: Look at the engine and cockpit, glance at the plane’s maintenance log, ask the pilots if they feel rested.” This is obviously ridiculous advice. The average person doesn’t have the training or expertise to evaluate restaurant or aircraft safety—and we don’t expect them to. We have laws and regulations in place that allow people to eat at a restaurant or board a plane without worry.
But—we get it—the government isn’t going to step in and regulate the Internet. These insecure systems are what we have. Security awareness training, and the blame-the-user mentality that comes with it, are all we have. So if we want meaningful behavioral change, it needs a lot more than just a pause. It needs cognitive scaffolding and system designs that account for all the dynamic interactions that go into a decision to click, download, or share. And that takes real work—more work than just an ad campaign and a slick video.
This essay was written with Arun Vishwanath, and originally appeared in Dark Reading.
In case you need proof that anyone, even someone who does cybersecurity for a living, can fall for a phishing attack, Troy Hunt has a long, iterative story on his webpage about how he got phished. Worth reading.
Phishing attacks have grown both in volume and in sophistication over recent years. Today’s threat isn’t just about sending out generic emails — bad actors are using advanced phishing techniques like 2 factor monster in the middle (MitM) attacks, QR codes to bypass detection rules, and using artificial intelligence (AI) to craft personalized and targeted phishing messages at scale. Industry organizations such as the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) have shown that phishing incidents continue to climb year over year.
To combat both the increase in phishing attacks and the growing complexity, we have built advanced automation tooling to both detect and take action.
In the first half of 2024, Cloudflare resolved 37% of phishing reports using automated means, and the median time to take action on hosted phishing reports was 3.4 days. In the second half of 2024, after deployment of our new tooling, we were able to expand our automated systems to resolve 78% of phishing reports with a median time to take action on hosted phishing reports of under an hour.
In this post we dig into some of the details of how we implemented these improvements.
The phishing site problem
Cloudflare has observed a similar increase in the volume of phishing activity throughout 2023 and 2024. We receive abuse reports from anyone on the Internet that may have seen potentially abusive behaviors from websites using Cloudflare services. Our Trust & Safety investigators and engineers have been tasked with responding to these complaints, and more recently have been using the data from these reports to improve our threat intelligence, brand protection, and email security product offerings.
Cloudflare has always believed in using the vast amounts of traffic that flows through our network to improve threat detection and customer security. This has been at the core of how we protect our customers from DoS attacks and other cybersecurity threats. We’ve been applying the same concepts our internal teams use to mitigate phishing to improve detection of phishing on our network and our ability to detect and notify our customers about potential risks to their brand.
Prior to last year, phishing abuse reported to Cloudflare relied on manual, human review and intervention to remediate. Trust & Safety (T&S) investigators would have to look at each complaint, the allegations made by the reporter, and the content on the reported websites to make assessments as quickly as possible about whether the website was phishing or malware.
Given the growing scale of our customer base and phishing across the Internet, this became unsustainable. By collecting a group of internal experts on abuse, we were able to tackle this problem by using insights across our network, internal data from our Email Security product, external feeds from trusted sources, and years of abuse report processing data to automatically assess risk of likely phishing and recommend appropriate action.
Turning our intelligence inward
We built our automated phishing identification on the Cloudflare Developer Platform so that we could meet our scanning demand without concern for how we might scale. This allowed us to focus more on creating a great phishing detection engine and less on the infrastructure required to meet that demand.
Each URL submitted to our phishing detection Worker begins with an initial scan by the Cloudflare URL Scanner. The scan provides us with the rendered HTML, network requests, and attributes of the site. After scanning, we collect reputational information about the site by submitting the HTML and page resources to our in-house machine learning classifiers; meanwhile, the indicators of compromise (IOCs) are sent to our suite of threat feeds and domain categorization tools to highlight any known malicious sites or site categorizations.
Once we have all of this information collected, we expose it to a set of rules and heuristics that identify the URL as phishing or not based on how T&S investigators have traditionally responded to similar abuse reports and patterns of bad behaviors we’ve observed. Rules will suggest decisions to make against the reports, and remediations to make against harmful content. It is through this process that we were able to convert the manual reviews by T&S investigators into an automated flow of phishing identification. We also recognize that reporters make mistakes or even deliberately try to weaponize abuse processes. Our rules must therefore consider the possibility of false positives, in which reports are created against legitimate websites (intentionally or unintentionally). False positives can erode the trust of our customers and create incidents, so automation must include processes to disregard erroneous reports.
The magic of all of this was the powerful suite of tools on the Cloudflare Developer Platform. Whether it was using KV to store report summaries that could scale indefinitely or Durable Objects to keep running counters of an unlimited number of attributes that could be tracked or leveraged over time, we were able to integrate the solutions quickly allowing us easily add or remove new enrichments with little effort. We also made use of Hyperdrive to access the internal Postgres database that stores our abuse reports, Queues to manage the scanning jobs, Workers AI to run machine learning classifiers, and D1 to store detection logs for efficacy and evaluation review. To tie it all together, the team also deployed a Remix Pages UI to present all the phishing detection engine’s analysis to T&S investigators for follow-on investigations and evaluations of inconclusive results.
Architecture of Trust & Safety’s phishing automation detection pipeline
Moving forward
The same intelligence we’re gathering to expedite and refine abuse report processing isn’t just for abuse response; it’s also used to empower our customers. By analyzing patterns and trends of abusive behaviors — such as identifying common phrases used in phishing attempts, recognizing infrastructure used by malicious actors or spotting coordinated campaigns across multiple domains — we enhance the efficacy of our application security, email security, and threat intelligence products.
For our Brand Protection customers, this translates into a significant advantage: the ability to easily report suspected abuse directly from the Cloudflare dashboard. This feature ensures that potential phishing sites are addressed rapidly, minimizing the risk to your customers and brand reputation. Furthermore, the Trust and Safety team can use this information to take action on similar threats across the Cloudflare network, protecting all customers, even those who aren’t Brand Protection users.
Alongside our network-wide efforts, we’ve also been partnering with our customers, as well as experts outside of Cloudflare, to understand trends they are seeing in their own phishing mitigation efforts. By soliciting intelligence regarding the abuse issues that affect the attack’s targets, we can better identify and prevent abuse of Cloudflare products. We’ve been able to use these partnerships and discussions with external organizations to craft highly targeted rules that head off emerging patterns of phishing activity.
It takes a village: if you see something, say something
If you believe you’ve identified phishing activity that is passing through Cloudflare’s network, please report it via our abuse reporting form. For technical users who might be interested in a programmatic way to report to us, please review our abuse reporting API documentation.
We invite all of our customers to join us in helping make the Internet safer:
Enterprise customers should speak with their Customer Success Manager about enabling Brand Protection, included by default for all enterprise customers.
For existing users of the Brand Protection product, update your brand’s assets, so we can better identify the legitimate websites and logos of our customers vs. possible phishing activity.
As a Cloudflare customer, make sure your abuse contact is up-to-date in the Cloudflare dashboard.
The technique is known as device code phishing. It exploits “device code flow,” a form of authentication formalized in the industry-wide OAuth standard. Authentication through device code flow is designed for logging printers, smart TVs, and similar devices into accounts. These devices typically don’t support browsers, making it difficult to sign in using more standard forms of authentication, such as entering user names, passwords, and two-factor mechanisms.
Rather than authenticating the user directly, the input-constrained device displays an alphabetic or alphanumeric device code along with a link associated with the user account. The user opens the link on a computer or other device that’s easier to sign in with and enters the code. The remote server then sends a token to the input-constrained device that logs it into the account.
Device authorization relies on two paths: one from an app or code running on the input-constrained device seeking permission to log in and the other from the browser of the device the user normally uses for signing in.
I am always interested in new phishing tricks, and watching them spread across the ecosystem.
A few days ago I started getting phishing SMS messages with a new twist. They were standard messages about delayed packages or somesuch, with the goal of getting me to click on a link and entering some personal information into a website. But because they came from unknown phone numbers, the links did not work. So—this is the new bit—the messages said something like: “Please reply Y, then exit the text message, reopen the text message activation link, or copy the link to Safari browser to open it.”
I saw it once, and now I am seeing it again and again. Everyone has now adopted this new trick.
One article claims that this trick has been popular since last summer. I don’t know; I would have expected to have seen it before last weekend.
A very security-conscious company was hit with a (presumed) massive state-actor phishing attack with gift cards, and everyone rallied to combat it—until it turned out it was company management sending the gift cards.
Being a bad guy on the Internet is a really good business. In more than 90% of cybersecurity incidents, phishing is the root cause of the attack, and during this third week of August phishing attacks were reported against the U.S. elections, in the geopolitical conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and to cause $60M in corporate losses.
You might think that after 30 years of email being the top vector for attack and risk we are helpless to do anything about it, but that would be giving too much credit to bad actors, and a misunderstanding of how defenders focused on detections can take control and win.
Phishing isn’t about email exclusively, or any specific protocol for that matter. Simply put, it is an attempt to get a person, like you or me, to take an action that unwittingly leads to damages. These attacks work because they appear to be authentic, visually or organizationally, such as pretending to be the CEO or CFO of your company, and when you break it down they are three main attack vectors that Cloudflare has seen most impactful from the bad emails we protect our customers from: 1. Clicking links (deceptive links are 35.6% of threat indicators) 2. Downloading files or malware (malicious attachments are 1.9% of threat indicators) 3. Business email compromise (BEC) phishing that elicits money or intellectual property with no links or files (0.5% of threat indicators).
Today, we at Cloudflare see an increase in what we’ve termed multi-channel phishing. What other channels are there to send links, files and elicit BEC actions? There’s SMS (text messaging) and public and private messaging applications, which are increasingly common attack vectors that take advantage of the ability to send links over those channels, and also how people consume information and work. There’s cloud collaboration, where attackers rely on links, files, and BEC phishing on commonly used collaboration tools like Google Workspace, Atlassian, and Microsoft Office 365. And finally, there’s web and social phishing targeting people on LinkedIn and X. Ultimately, any attempt to stop phishing needs to be comprehensive enough to detect and protect against these different vectors.
Learn more about these technologies and products here
A real example
It’s one thing to tell you this, but we’d love to give you an example of how a multi-channel phish plays out with a sophisticated attacker.
Here’s an email message that an executive notices is in their junk folder. That’s because our Email Security product noticed there’s something off about it and moved it there, but it relates to a project the executive is working on, so the executive thinks it’s legitimate. There’s a request for a company org chart, and the attacker knows that this is the kind of thing that’s going to be caught if they continue on email, so they include a link to a real Google form:
The executive clicks the link, and because it is a legitimate Google form, it displays the following:
There’s a request to upload the org chart here, and that’s what they try to do:
The executive drags it in, but it doesn’t finish uploading because in the document there is an “internal only” watermark that our Gateway and digital loss prevention (DLP) engine detected, which in turn prevented the upload.
Sophisticated attackers use urgency to drive better outcomes. Here, the attackers know the executive has an upcoming deadline for the consultant to report back to the CEO. Unable to upload the document, they respond back to the attacker. The attacker suggests that they try another method of upload or, in the worst case scenario, send the document on WhatsApp.
The executive attempts to upload the org chart to the website they were provided in the second email, not knowing that this site would have loaded malware, but because it was loaded in Cloudflare’s Browser Isolation, it kept the executive’s device safe. Most importantly, when trying to upload sensitive company documents, the action is stopped again:
Finally they try WhatsApp, and again, we block it:
Ease of use
Setting up a security solution and maintaining it is critical to long term protection. However, having IT administration teams constantly tweak each product, configuration, and monitor each users’ needs is not only costly but risky as well, as it puts a large amount of overhead on these teams.
Protecting the executive in the example above required just four steps:
Install and login to Cloudflare’s device agent for protection
With just a few clicks, anyone with the device agent client can be protected against multi-channel phish, making it easy for end users and administrators. For organizations that don’t allow clients to be installed, an agentless deployment is also available.
2. Configure policies that apply to all your user traffic routed through our secure web gateway. These policies can block access outright to high risk sites, such as those known to participate in phishing campaigns. For sites that may be suspicious, such as newly registered domains, isolated browser access allows users to access the website, but limits their interaction.
The executive was also unable to upload the org chart to a free cloud storage service because their organization is using Cloudflare One’s Gateway and Browser Isolation solutions that were configured to load any free cloud storage websites in a remote isolated environment, which not only prevented the upload but also removed the ability to copy and paste information as well.
Also, while the executive was able to converse with the bad actor over WhatsApp, their files were blocked because of Cloudflare One’s Gateway solution, configured by the administrator to block all uploads and downloads on WhatsApp.
3. Set up DLP policies based on what shouldn’t be uploaded, typed, or copied and pasted.
The executive was unable to upload the org chart to the Google form because the organization is using Cloudflare One’s Gateway and DLP solutions. This protection is implemented by configuring Gateway to block any DLP infraction, even on a valid website like Google.
4. Deploy Email Security and set up auto-move rules based on the types of emails detected.
In the example above, the executive never received any of the multiple malicious emails that were sent to them because Cloudflare’s Email Security was protecting their inbox. The phishing emails that did arrive were put into their Junk folder because the email was impersonating someone that didn’t match the signature in the email, and the configuration in Email Security automatically moved it there because of a one-click configuration set by the executive’s IT administrator.
But even with best-in-class detections, it goes without saying that it is important to have the ability to drill down on any metric to learn about individual users that are being impacted by an ongoing attack. Below is a mockup of our upcoming improved email security monitoring dashboard.
What’s next
While phishing, despite being around for three decades, continues to be a clear and present danger, effective detections in a seamless and comprehensive solution are really the only way to stay protected these days.
If you’re simply thinking about purchasing email security by itself, you can see why that just isn’t enough. Multi-layered protection is absolutely necessary to protect modern workforces, because work and data don’t just sit in email. They’re everywhere and on every device. Your phishing protection needs to be as well.
While you can do this by stitching together multiple vendors, it just won’t all work together. And besides the cost, a multi-vendor approach also usually increases overhead for investigation, maintenance, and uniformity for IT teams that are already stretched thin.
Whether or not you are at the start of your journey with Cloudflare, you can see how getting different parts of the Cloudflare One product suite can help holistically with phishing. And if you are already deep in your journey with Cloudflare, and are looking for 99.99% effective email detections trusted by the Fortune 500, global organizations, and even government entities, you can see how our Email Security helps.
If you’re running Office 365, and you’d like to see what we can catch that your current provider cannot, you can start right now with Retro Scan.
And if you are using our Email Security solution already, you can learn more about our comprehensive protection here.
A piece I coauthored with Fredrik Heiding and Arun Vishwanath in the Harvard Business Review:
Summary. Gen AI tools are rapidly making these emails more advanced, harder to spot, and significantly more dangerous. Recent research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to artificial intelligence (AI)-automated phishing, which is comparable to the success rates of non-AI-phishing messages created by human experts. Companies need to: 1) understand the asymmetrical capabilities of AI-enhanced phishing, 2) determine the company or division’s phishing threat severity level, and 3) confirm their current phishing awareness routines.
Cloudforce One is publishing the results of our investigation and real-time effort to detect, deny, degrade, disrupt, and delay threat activity by the Russia-aligned threat actor FlyingYeti during their latest phishing campaign targeting Ukraine. At the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Ukraine introduced a moratorium on evictions and termination of utility services for unpaid debt. The moratorium ended in January 2024, resulting in significant debt liability and increased financial stress for Ukrainian citizens. The FlyingYeti campaign capitalized on anxiety over the potential loss of access to housing and utilities by enticing targets to open malicious files via debt-themed lures. If opened, the files would result in infection with the PowerShell malware known as COOKBOX, allowing FlyingYeti to support follow-on objectives, such as installation of additional payloads and control over the victim’s system.
Since April 26, 2024, Cloudforce One has taken measures to prevent FlyingYeti from launching their phishing campaign – a campaign involving the use of Cloudflare Workers and GitHub, as well as exploitation of the WinRAR vulnerability CVE-2023-38831. Our countermeasures included internal actions, such as detections and code takedowns, as well as external collaboration with third parties to remove the actor’s cloud-hosted malware. Our effectiveness against this actor prolonged their operational timeline from days to weeks. For example, in a single instance, FlyingYeti spent almost eight hours debugging their code as a result of our mitigations. By employing proactive defense measures, we successfully stopped this determined threat actor from achieving their objectives.
Executive Summary
On April 18, 2024, Cloudforce One detected the Russia-aligned threat actor FlyingYeti preparing to launch a phishing espionage campaign targeting individuals in Ukraine.
From mid-April to mid-May, we observed FlyingYeti conduct reconnaissance activity, create lure content for use in their phishing campaign, and develop various iterations of their malware. We assessed that the threat actor intended to launch their campaign in early May, likely following Orthodox Easter.
After several weeks of monitoring actor reconnaissance and weaponization activity (Cyber Kill Chain Stages 1 and 2), we successfully disrupted FlyingYeti’s operation moments after the final COOKBOX payload was built.
The payload included an exploit for the WinRAR vulnerability CVE-2023-38831, which FlyingYeti will likely continue to use in their phishing campaigns to infect targets with malware.
We offer steps users can take to defend themselves against FlyingYeti phishing operations, and also provide recommendations, detections, and indicators of compromise.
Who is FlyingYeti?
FlyingYeti is the cryptonym given by Cloudforce One to the threat group behind this phishing campaign, which overlaps with UAC-0149 activity tracked by CERT-UA in February and April 2024. The threat actor uses dynamic DNS (DDNS) for their infrastructure and leverages cloud-based platforms for hosting malicious content and for malware command and control (C2). Our investigation of FlyingYeti TTPs suggests this is likely a Russia-aligned threat group. The actor appears to primarily focus on targeting Ukrainian military entities. Additionally, we observed Russian-language comments in FlyingYeti’s code, and the actor’s operational hours falling within the UTC+3 time zone.
Campaign background
In the days leading up to the start of the campaign, Cloudforce One observed FlyingYeti conducting reconnaissance on payment processes for Ukrainian communal housing and utility services:
April 22, 2024 – research into changes made in 2016 that introduced the use of QR codes in payment notices
April 22, 2024 – research on current developments concerning housing and utility debt in Ukraine
April 25, 2024 – research on the legal basis for restructuring housing debt in Ukraine as well as debt involving utilities, such as gas and electricity
Cloudforce One judges that the observed reconnaissance is likely due to the Ukrainian government’s payment moratorium introduced at the start of the full-fledged invasion in February 2022. Under this moratorium, outstanding debt would not lead to evictions or termination of provision of utility services. However, on January 9, 2024, the government lifted this ban, resulting in increased pressure on Ukrainian citizens with outstanding debt. FlyingYeti sought to capitalize on that pressure, leveraging debt restructuring and payment-related lures in an attempt to increase their chances of successfully targeting Ukrainian individuals.
Analysis of the Komunalka-themed phishing site
The disrupted phishing campaign would have directed FlyingYeti targets to an actor-controlled GitHub page at hxxps[:]//komunalka[.]github[.]io, which is a spoofed version of the Kyiv Komunalka communal housing site https://www.komunalka.ua. Komunalka functions as a payment processor for residents in the Kyiv region and allows for payment of utilities, such as gas, electricity, telephone, and Internet. Additionally, users can pay other fees and fines, and even donate to Ukraine’s defense forces.
Based on past FlyingYeti operations, targets may be directed to the actor’s Github page via a link in a phishing email or an encrypted Signal message. If a target accesses the spoofed Komunalka platform at hxxps[:]//komunalka[.]github[.]io, the page displays a large green button with a prompt to download the document “Рахунок.docx” (“Invoice.docx”), as shown in Figure 1. This button masquerades as a link to an overdue payment invoice but actually results in the download of the malicious archive “Заборгованість по ЖКП.rar” (“Debt for housing and utility services.rar”).
Figure 1: Prompt to download malicious archive “Заборгованість по ЖКП.rar”
A series of steps must take place for the download to successfully occur:
The target clicks the green button on the actor’s GitHub page hxxps[:]//komunalka.github[.]io
The target’s device sends an HTTP POST request to the Cloudflare Worker worker-polished-union-f396[.]vqu89698[.]workers[.]dev with the HTTP request body set to “user=Iahhdr”
The Cloudflare Worker processes the request and evaluates the HTTP request body
If the request conditions are met, the Worker fetches the RAR file from hxxps[:]//raw[.]githubusercontent[.]com/kudoc8989/project/main/Заборгованість по ЖКП.rar, which is then downloaded on the target’s device
Cloudforce One identified the infrastructure responsible for facilitating the download of the malicious RAR file and remediated the actor-associated Worker, preventing FlyingYeti from delivering its malicious tooling. In an effort to circumvent Cloudforce One’s mitigation measures, FlyingYeti later changed their malware delivery method. Instead of the Workers domain fetching the malicious RAR file, it was loaded directly from GitHub.
Analysis of the malicious RAR file
During remediation, Cloudforce One recovered the RAR file “Заборгованість по ЖКП.rar” and performed analysis of the malicious payload. The downloaded RAR archive contains multiple files, including a file with a name that contains the unicode character “U+201F”. This character appears as whitespace on Windows devices and can be used to “hide” file extensions by adding excessive whitespace between the filename and the file extension. As highlighted in blue in Figure 2, this cleverly named file within the RAR archive appears to be a PDF document but is actually a malicious CMD file (“Рахунок на оплату.pdf[unicode character U+201F].cmd”).
Figure 2: Files contained in the malicious RAR archive “Заборгованість по ЖКП.rar” (“Housing Debt.rar”)
FlyingYeti included a benign PDF in the archive with the same name as the CMD file but without the unicode character, “Рахунок на оплату.pdf” (“Invoice for payment.pdf”). Additionally, the directory name for the archive once decompressed also contained the name “Рахунок на оплату.pdf”. This overlap in names of the benign PDF and the directory allows the actor to exploit the WinRAR vulnerability CVE-2023-38831. More specifically, when an archive includes a benign file with the same name as the directory, the entire contents of the directory are opened by the WinRAR application, resulting in the execution of the malicious CMD. In other words, when the target believes they are opening the benign PDF “Рахунок на оплату.pdf”, the malicious CMD file is executed.
The CMD file contains the FlyingYeti PowerShell malware known as COOKBOX. The malware is designed to persist on a host, serving as a foothold in the infected device. Once installed, this variant of COOKBOX will make requests to the DDNS domain postdock[.]serveftp[.]com for C2, awaiting PowerShell cmdlets that the malware will subsequently run.
Alongside COOKBOX, several decoy documents are opened, which contain hidden tracking links using the Canary Tokens service. The first document, shown in Figure 3 below, poses as an agreement under which debt for housing and utility services will be restructured.
Figure 3: Decoy document Реструктуризація боргу за житлово комунальні послуги.docx
The second document (Figure 4) is a user agreement outlining the terms and conditions for the usage of the payment platform komunalka[.]ua.
The use of relevant decoy documents as part of the phishing and delivery activity are likely an effort by FlyingYeti operators to increase the appearance of legitimacy of their activities.
The phishing theme we identified in this campaign is likely one of many themes leveraged by this actor in a larger operation to target Ukrainian entities, in particular their defense forces. In fact, the threat activity we detailed in this blog uses many of the same techniques outlined in a recent FlyingYeti campaign disclosed by CERT-UA in mid-April 2024, where the actor leveraged United Nations-themed lures involving Peace Support Operations to target Ukraine’s military. Due to Cloudforce One’s defensive actions covered in the next section, this latest FlyingYeti campaign was prevented as of the time of publication.
Mitigating FlyingYeti activity
Cloudforce One mitigated FlyingYeti’s campaign through a series of actions. Each action was taken to increase the actor’s cost of continuing their operations. When assessing which action to take and why, we carefully weighed the pros and cons in order to provide an effective active defense strategy against this actor. Our general goal was to increase the amount of time the threat actor spent trying to develop and weaponize their campaign.
We were able to successfully extend the timeline of the threat actor’s operations from hours to weeks. At each interdiction point, we assessed the impact of our mitigation to ensure the actor would spend more time attempting to launch their campaign. Our mitigation measures disrupted the actor’s activity, in one instance resulting in eight additional hours spent on debugging code.
Due to our proactive defense efforts, FlyingYeti operators adapted their tactics multiple times in their attempts to launch the campaign. The actor originally intended to have the Cloudflare Worker fetch the malicious RAR file from GitHub. After Cloudforce One interdiction of the Worker, the actor attempted to create additional Workers via a new account. In response, we disabled all Workers, leading the actor to load the RAR file directly from GitHub. Cloudforce One notified GitHub, resulting in the takedown of the RAR file, the GitHub project, and suspension of the account used to host the RAR file. In return, FlyingYeti began testing the option to host the RAR file on the file sharing sites pixeldrain and Filemail, where we observed the actor alternating the link on the Komunalka phishing site between the following:
We notified GitHub of the actor’s evolving tactics, and in response GitHub removed the Komunalka phishing site. After analyzing the files hosted on pixeldrain and Filemail, we determined the actor uploaded dummy payloads, likely to monitor access to their phishing infrastructure (FileMail logs IP addresses, and both file hosting sites provide view and download counts). At the time of publication, we did not observe FlyingYeti upload the malicious RAR file to either file hosting site, nor did we identify the use of alternative phishing or malware delivery methods.
A timeline of FlyingYeti’s activity and our corresponding mitigations can be found below.
Event timeline
Date
Event Description
2024-04-18 12:18
Threat Actor (TA) creates a Worker to handle requests from a phishing site
2024-04-18 14:16
TA creates phishing site komunalka[.]github[.]io on GitHub
2024-04-25 12:25
TA creates a GitHub repo to host a RAR file
2024-04-26 07:46
TA updates the first Worker to handle requests from users visiting komunalka[.]github[.]io
2024-04-26 08:24
TA uploads a benign test RAR to the GitHub repo
2024-04-26 13:38
Cloudforce One identifies a Worker receiving requests from users visiting komunalka[.]github[.]io, observes its use as a phishing page
2024-04-26 13:46
Cloudforce One identifies that the Worker fetches a RAR file from GitHub (the malicious RAR payload is not yet hosted on the site)
2024-04-26 19:22
Cloudforce One creates a detection to identify the Worker that fetches the RAR
2024-04-26 21:13
Cloudforce One deploys real-time monitoring of the RAR file on GitHub
2024-05-02 06:35
TA deploys a weaponized RAR (CVE-2023-38831) to GitHub with their COOKBOX malware packaged in the archive
2024-05-06 10:03
TA attempts to update the Worker with link to weaponized RAR, the Worker is immediately blocked
2024-05-06 10:38
TA creates a new Worker, the Worker is immediately blocked
2024-05-06 11:04
TA creates a new account (#2) on Cloudflare
2024-05-06 11:06
TA creates a new Worker on account #2 (blocked)
2024-05-06 11:50
TA creates a new Worker on account #2 (blocked)
2024-05-06 12:22
TA creates a new modified Worker on account #2
2024-05-06 16:05
Cloudforce One disables the running Worker on account #2
2024-05-07 22:16
TA notices the Worker is blocked, ceases all operations
2024-05-07 22:18
TA deletes original Worker first created to fetch the RAR file from the GitHub phishing page
2024-05-09 19:28
Cloudforce One adds phishing page komunalka[.]github[.]io to real-time monitoring
2024-05-13 07:36
TA updates the github.io phishing site to point directly to the GitHub RAR link
2024-05-13 17:47
Cloudforce One adds COOKBOX C2 postdock[.]serveftp[.]com to real-time monitoring for DNS resolution
2024-05-14 00:04
Cloudforce One notifies GitHub to take down the RAR file
2024-05-15 09:00
GitHub user, project, and link for RAR are no longer accessible
2024-05-21 08:23
TA updates Komunalka phishing site on github.io to link to pixeldrain URL for dummy payload (pixeldrain only tracks view and download counts)
2024-05-21 08:25
TA updates Komunalka phishing site to link to FileMail URL for dummy payload (FileMail tracks not only view and download counts, but also IP addresses)
2024-05-21 12:21
Cloudforce One downloads PixelDrain document to evaluate payload
2024-05-21 12:47
Cloudforce One downloads FileMail document to evaluate payload
2024-05-29 23:59
GitHub takes down Komunalka phishing site
2024-05-30 13:00
Cloudforce One publishes the results of this investigation
Coordinating our FlyingYeti response
Cloudforce One leveraged industry relationships to provide advanced warning and to mitigate the actor’s activity. To further protect the intended targets from this phishing threat, Cloudforce One notified and collaborated closely with GitHub’s Threat Intelligence and Trust and Safety Teams. We also notified CERT-UA and Cloudflare industry partners such as CrowdStrike, Mandiant/Google Threat Intelligence, and Microsoft Threat Intelligence.
Hunting FlyingYeti operations
There are several ways to hunt FlyingYeti in your environment. These include using PowerShell to hunt for WinRAR files, deploying Microsoft Sentinel analytics rules, and running Splunk scripts as detailed below. Note that these detections may identify activity related to this threat, but may also trigger unrelated threat activity.
PowerShell hunting
Consider running a PowerShell script such as this one in your environment to identify exploitation of CVE-2023-38831. This script will interrogate WinRAR files for evidence of the exploit.
CVE-2023-38831
Description:winrar exploit detection
open suspios (.tar / .zip / .rar) and run this script to check it
function winrar-exploit-detect(){
$targetExtensions = @(".cmd" , ".ps1" , ".bat")
$tempDir = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("TEMP")
$dirsToCheck = Get-ChildItem -Path $tempDir -Directory -Filter "Rar*"
foreach ($dir in $dirsToCheck) {
$files = Get-ChildItem -Path $dir.FullName -File
foreach ($file in $files) {
$fileName = $file.Name
$fileExtension = [System.IO.Path]::GetExtension($fileName)
if ($targetExtensions -contains $fileExtension) {
$fileWithoutExtension = [System.IO.Path]::GetFileNameWithoutExtension($fileName); $filename.TrimEnd() -replace '\.$'
$cmdFileName = "$fileWithoutExtension"
$secondFile = Join-Path -Path $dir.FullName -ChildPath $cmdFileName
if (Test-Path $secondFile -PathType Leaf) {
Write-Host "[!] Suspicious pair detected "
Write-Host "[*] Original File:$($secondFile)" -ForegroundColor Green
Write-Host "[*] Suspicious File:$($file.FullName)" -ForegroundColor Red
# Read and display the content of the command file
$cmdFileContent = Get-Content -Path $($file.FullName)
Write-Host "[+] Command File Content:$cmdFileContent"
}
}
}
}
}
winrar-exploit-detect
Microsoft Sentinel
In Microsoft Sentinel, consider deploying the rule provided below, which identifies WinRAR execution via cmd.exe. Results generated by this rule may be indicative of attack activity on the endpoint and should be analyzed.
DeviceProcessEvents
| where InitiatingProcessParentFileName has @"winrar.exe"
| where InitiatingProcessFileName has @"cmd.exe"
| project Timestamp, DeviceName, FileName, FolderPath, ProcessCommandLine, AccountName
| sort by Timestamp desc
Splunk
Consider using this script in your Splunk environment to look for WinRAR CVE-2023-38831 execution on your Microsoft endpoints. Results generated by this script may be indicative of attack activity on the endpoint and should be analyzed.
| tstats `security_content_summariesonly` count min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime from datamodel=Endpoint.Processes where Processes.parent_process_name=winrar.exe `windows_shells` OR Processes.process_name IN ("certutil.exe","mshta.exe","bitsadmin.exe") by Processes.dest Processes.user Processes.parent_process_name Processes.parent_process Processes.process_name Processes.process Processes.process_id Processes.parent_process_id
| `drop_dm_object_name(Processes)`
| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)`
| `security_content_ctime(lastTime)`
| `winrar_spawning_shell_application_filter`
Cloudflare product detections
Cloudflare Email Security
Cloudflare Email Security (CES) customers can identify FlyingYeti threat activity with the following detections.
CVE-2023-38831
FLYINGYETI.COOKBOX
FLYINGYETI.COOKBOX.Launcher
FLYINGYETI.Rar
Recommendations
Cloudflare recommends taking the following steps to mitigate this type of activity:
Implement Zero Trust architecture foundations:
Deploy Cloud Email Security to ensure that email services are protected against phishing, BEC and other threats
Leverage browser isolation to separate messaging applications like LinkedIn, email, and Signal from your main network
Scan, monitor and/or enforce controls on specific or sensitive data moving through your network environment with data loss prevention policies
Ensure your systems have the latest WinRAR and Microsoft security updates installed
Consider preventing WinRAR files from entering your environment, both at your Cloud Email Security solution and your Internet Traffic Gateway
Run an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tool such as CrowdStrike or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to get visibility into binary execution on hosts
Search your environment for the FlyingYeti indicators of compromise (IOCs) shown below to identify potential actor activity within your network.
If you’re looking to uncover additional Threat Intelligence insights for your organization or need bespoke Threat Intelligence information for an incident, consider engaging with Cloudforce One by contacting your Customer Success manager or filling out this form.
In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats, a subtle yet potent form of phishing has emerged — quishing, short for QR phishing. It has been 30 years since the invention of QR codes, yet quishing still poses a significant risk, especially after the era of COVID, when QR codes became the norm to check statuses, register for events, and even order food.
Since 2020, Cloudflare’s cloud email security solution (previously known as Area 1) has been at the forefront of fighting against quishing attacks, taking a proactive stance in dissecting them to better protect our customers. Let’s delve into the mechanisms behind QR phishing, explore why QR codes are a preferred tool for attackers, and review how Cloudflare contributes to the fight against this evolving threat.
How quishing works
The impact of phishing and quishing are quite similar, as both can result in users having their credentials compromised, devices compromised, or even financial loss. They also leverage malicious attachments or websites to provide bad actors the ability to access something they normally wouldn’t be able to. Where they differ is that quishing is typically highly targeted and uses a QR code to further obfuscate itself from detection.
Since phish detection engines require inputs like URLs or attachments inside an email in order to detect, quish succeeds by hampering the detection of these inputs. In Example A below, the phish’s URL was crawled and after two redirects landed on a malicious website that automatically tries to run key logging malware that copies login names and passwords. For Example A, this clearly sets off the detectors, but Example B has no link to crawl and therefore the same detections that worked on Example A are rendered inert.
Strange you say, if my phone can scan that QR code then can’t a detection engine recognize the QR code as well? Simply put, no, because phish detection engines are optimized for catching phish, but to identify and scan QR codes requires a completely different engine – a computer vision engine. This brings us to why QR codes are a preferred tool for attackers.
Why QR codes for phishing?
There are three main reasons QR codes are popular in phishing attacks. First, QR codes boast strong error correction capabilities, allowing them to withstand resizing, pixel shifting, variations in lighting, partial cropping, and other distortions. Indeed, computer vision models can scan QR codes, but identifying which section of an email, image, or webpage linked in an email has a QR code is quite difficult for a machine, and even more so if the QR codes have been obfuscated to hide themselves from some computer vision models. For example, by inverting them, blending them with other colors or images, or making them extremely small, computer vision models will have trouble even identifying the presence of QR codes, much less even being able to scan them. Though filters and additional processing can be applied to any image, not knowing what or where to apply makes the deobfuscation of a QR code an extremely expensive computational problem. This not only makes catching all quish hard, but is likely to cause frustration for an end user who won’t get their emails quickly because an image or blob of text looks similar to a QR code, resulting in delivery delays.
Even though computer vision models may have difficulty deobfuscating QR codes, we have discovered from experience that when a human encounters these obfuscated QR codes, with enough time and effort, they are usually able to scan the QR code. By doing everything from increasing the brightness of their screen, to printing out the email, to resizing the codes themselves, they can make a QR code that has been hidden from machines scan successfully.
Don’t believe us? Try it for yourself with the QR codes that have been obfuscated for machines. They all link to https://blog.cloudflare.com/
If you scanned any of the example QR codes above, you have just proven the next reason bad actors favor quish. The devices used for accessing QR codes are typically personal devices with a limited security posture, making them susceptible to exploitation. While secured corporate devices typically have measures to warn, stop, or sandbox users when they access malicious links, these protections are not available natively on personal devices. This can be especially worrisome, as we have seen a trend towards custom QR codes targeting executives in organizations.
QR codes can also be seamlessly layered in with other obfuscation techniques, such as encrypted attachments, mirrors that mimic well-known websites, validations to prove you are human before malicious content is revealed, and more. This versatility makes them an attractive choice for cybercriminals seeking innovative ways to deceive unsuspecting users by adding QR codes to previously successful phishing vectors that have now been blocked by security products.
Cloudflare’s protection strategy
Cloudflare has been at the forefront of defending against quishing attacks. We employ a multi-faceted approach, and instead of focusing on archaic, layered email configuration rules, we have trained our machine learning (ML) detection models on almost a decade’s worth of detection data and have a swath of proactive computer vision models to ensure all of our customers start with a turnkey solution.
For quish detections, we break it into two parts: 1) identification and scanning of QR codes 2) analysis of decoded QR codes.
The first part is solved by our own QR code detection heuristics that inform how, when, and where for our computer vision models to execute. We then leverage the newest libraries and tools to help identify, process, and most importantly decode QR codes. While it is relatively easy for a human to identify a QR code, there is almost no limit to how many ways they can be obfuscated to machines. The examples we provided above are just a small sample of what we’ve seen in the wild, and bad actors are constantly discovering new methods to make QR codes hard to quickly find and identify, making it a constant cat and mouse game that requires us to regularly update our tools for the trending obfuscation technique.
The second part, analysis of decoded QR codes, goes through all the same treatment we apply to phish and then some. We have engines that deconstruct complex URLs and drill down to the final URL, from redirect to redirect, whether they are automatic or not. Along the way, we scan for malicious attachments and malicious websites and log findings for future detections to cross-reference. If we encounter any files or content that are encrypted or password protected, we leverage another group of engines that attempt to decrypt and unprotect them, so we can identify if there was any obfuscated malicious content. Most importantly, with all of this information, we continuously update our databases with this new data, including the obfuscation of the QR code, to make better assessments of similar attacks that leverage the methods we have documented.
However, even with a well-trained suite of phish detection tools, quite often the malicious content is at the end of a long chain of redirects that prevent automated web crawlers from identifying anything at all, much less malicious content. In between redirects, there might be a hard block that requires human validation, such as a CAPTCHA, which makes it virtually impossible for an automated process to crawl past, and therefore unable to classify any content at all. Or there might be a conditional block with campaign identification requirements, so if anyone is outside the original target’s region or has a web browser and operating system version that doesn’t meet the campaign requirements, they would simply view a benign website, while the target would be exposed to the malicious content. Over the years, we have built tools to identify and pass these validations, so we can determine malicious content that may be there.
However, even with all the technologies we’ve built over the years, there are cases where we aren’t able to easily get to the final content. In those cases, our link reputation machine learning models, which have been trained on multiple years of scanned links and their metadata, have proven to be quite valuable and are easily applied after QR codes are decoded as well. By correlating things like domain metadata, URL structure, URL query strings, and our own historical data sets, we are able to make inferences to protect our customers. We also take a proactive approach and leverage our ML models to tell us where to hunt for QR codes, even if they aren’t immediately obvious, and by scrutinizing domains, sentiment, context, IP addresses, historical use, and social patterns between senders and recipients, Cloudflare identifies and neutralizes potential threats before they can inflict harm.
Creative examples and real world instances
With the thousands of QR codes we process daily, we see some interesting trends. Notable companies, including Microsoft and DocuSign, have frequently been the subjects of impersonation for quishing attacks. What makes this more confusing for users, and even more likely to scan them, is that these companies actually use QR codes in their legitimate workflows. This further underscores the urgency for organizations to fortify their defenses against this evolving threat.
Below are three examples of the most interesting quish we have found and compared against the real use cases by the respective companies. The QR codes used in these emails have been masked.
Microsoft Authenticator
Microsoft uses QR codes as a faster way to complete MFA instead of sending six digit SMS codes to users’ phones that can be delayed and are also considered safer, as SMS MFA can be intercepted through SIM swap attacks. Users would have independently registered their devices and would have previously seen the registration screen on the right, so receiving an email that says they need to re-authenticate doesn’t seem especially odd.
DocuSign
DocuSign uses QR codes to make it easier for users to download their mobile app tosign documents, identity verification via a mobile device to take photos, and supports embedding DocuSign features in third party apps which have their own QR code scanning functionality. The use of QR codes in native DocuSign apps and non-native apps makes it confusing for frequent DocuSign users and not at all peculiar for users that rarely use DocuSign. While the QR code for downloading the DocuSign app is not used in signature requests, to a frequent user, it might just seem like a fast method to open the request in the app they already have downloaded on their mobile device.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft uses QR codes for Teams to allow users to quickly join a team via a mobile device, and while Teams doesn’t use QR codes for voicemails, it does have a voicemail feature. The email on the left seems like a reminder to check voicemail in Teams and combines the two real use cases on the right.
How you can help prevent quishing
As we confront the persistent threat of quishing, it’s crucial for individuals and organizations to be vigilant. While no solution can guarantee 100% protection, collective diligence can significantly reduce the risk, and we encourage collaboration in the fight against quishing.
If you are already a Cloud Email Security customer, we remind you to submit instances of quish from within our portal to help stop current threats and enhance the capabilities of future machine learning models, leading to more proactive defense strategies. If you aren’t a customer, you can still submit original quish samples as an attachment in EML format to [email protected], and remember to leverage your email security provider’s submission process to inform them of these quishing vectors as well.
The battle against quishing is ongoing, requiring continuous innovation and collaboration. To support submissions of quish, we are developing new methods for customers to provide targeted feedback to our models and also adding additional transparency to our metrics to facilitate tracking a variety of vectors, including quish.
Brian Krebs reported that X (formerly known as Twitter) started automatically changing twitter.com links to x.com links. The problem is: (1) it changed any domain name that ended with “twitter.com,” and (2) it only changed the link’s appearance (anchortext), not the underlying URL. So if you were a clever phisher and registered fedetwitter.com, people would see the link as fedex.com, but it would send people to fedetwitter.com.
You’re browsing your inbox and spot an email that looks like it’s from a brand you trust. Yet, something feels off. This might be a phishing attempt, a common tactic where cybercriminals impersonate reputable entities — we’ve written about the top 50 most impersonated brands used in phishing attacks. One factor that can be used to help evaluate the email’s legitimacy is its Top-Level Domain (TLD) — the part of the email address that comes after the dot.
In this analysis, we focus on the TLDs responsible for a significant share of malicious or spam emails since January 2023. For the purposes of this blog post, we are considering malicious email messages to be equivalent to phishing attempts. With an average of 9% of 2023’s emails processed by Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security service marked as spam and 3% as malicious, rising to 4% by year-end, we aim to identify trends and signal which TLDs have become more dubious over time. Keep in mind that our measurements represent where we observe data across the email delivery flow. In some cases, we may be observing after initial filtering has taken place, at a point where missed classifications are likely to cause more damage. This information derived from this analysis could serve as a guide for Internet users, corporations, and geeks like us, searching for clues, as Internet detectives, in identifying potential threats. To make this data readily accessible, Cloudflare Radar, our tool for Internet insights, now includes a new section dedicated to email security trends.
Cyber attacks often leverage the guise of authenticity, a tactic Cloudflare thwarted following a phishing scheme similar to the one that compromised Twilio in 2022. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) notes that 90% of cyber attacks start with phishing, and fabricating trust is a key component of successful malicious attacks. We see there are two forms of authenticity that attackers can choose to leverage when crafting phishing messages, visual and organizational. Attacks that leverage visual authenticity rely on attackers using branding elements, like logos or images, to build credibility. Organizationally authentic campaigns rely on attackers using previously established relationships and business dynamics to establish trust and be successful.
Our findings from 2023 reveal that recently introduced generic TLDs (gTLDs), including several linked to the beauty industry, are predominantly used both for spam and malicious attacks. These TLDs, such as .uno, .sbs, and .beauty, all introduced since 2014, have seen over 95% of their emails flagged as spam or malicious. Also, it’s important to note that in terms of volume, “.com” accounts for 67% of all spam and malicious emails (more on that below).
TLDs
2023 Spam %
2023 Malicious %
2023 Spam + malicious %
TLD creation
.uno
62%
37%
99%
2014
.sbs
64%
35%
98%
2021
.best
68%
29%
97%
2014
.beauty
77%
20%
97%
2021
.top
74%
23%
97%
2014
.hair
78%
18%
97%
2021
.monster
80%
17%
96%
2019
.cyou
34%
62%
96%
2020
.wiki
69%
26%
95%
2014
.makeup
32%
63%
95%
2021
Email and Top-Level Domains history
In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email over ARPANET, using the @ character in the address. Five decades later, email remains relevant but also a key entry point for attackers.
Before the advent of the World Wide Web, email standardization and growth in the 1980s, especially within academia and military communities, led to interoperability. Fast forward 40 years, and this interoperability is once again a hot topic, with platforms like Threads, Mastodon, and other social media services aiming for the open communication that Jack Dorsey envisioned for Twitter. So, in 2024, it’s clear that social media, messaging apps like Slack, Teams, Google Chat, and others haven’t killed email, just as “video didn’t kill the radio star.”
The structure of a domain name.
The domain name system, managed by ICANN, encompasses a variety of TLDs, from the classic “.com” (1985) to the newer generic options. There are also the country-specific (ccTLDs), where the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is responsible for determining an appropriate trustee for each ccTLD. An extensive 2014 expansion by ICANN was designed to “increase competition and choice in the domain name space,” introducing numerous new options for specific professional, business, and informational purposes, which in turn, also opened up new possibilities for phishing attempts.
3.4 billion unwanted emails
Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security service is helping protect our customers, and that also comes with insights. In 2022, Cloudflare blocked 2.4 billion unwanted emails, and in 2023 that number rose to over 3.4 billion unwanted emails, 26% of all messages processed. This total includes spam, malicious, and “bulk” (practice of sending a single email message, unsolicited or solicited, to a large number of recipients simultaneously) emails. That means an average of 9.3 million per day, 6500 per minute, 108 per second.
Bear in mind that new customers also make the numbers grow — in this case, driving a 42% increase in unwanted emails from 2022 to 2023. But this gives a sense of scale in this email area. Those unwanted emails can include malicious attacks that are difficult to detect, becoming more frequent, and can have devastating consequences for individuals and businesses that fall victim to them. Below, we’ll give more details on email threats, where malicious messages account for almost 3% of emails averaged across all of 2023 and it shows a growth tendency during the year, with higher percentages in the last months of the year. Let’s take a closer look.
Top phishing TLDs (and types of TLDs)
First, let’s start with an 2023 overview of top level domains with a high percentage of spam and malicious messages. Despite excluding TLDs with fewer than 20,000 emails, our analysis covers unwanted emails considered to be spam and malicious from more than 350 different TLDs (and yes, there are many more).
A quick overview highlights the TLDs with the highest rates of spam and malicious attacks as a proportion of their outbound email, those with the largest volume share of spam or malicious emails, and those with the highest rates of just-malicious and just-spam TLD senders. It reveals that newer TLDs, especially those associated with the beauty industry (generally available since 2021 and serving a booming industry), have the highest rates as a proportion of their emails. However, it’s relevant to recognize that “.com” accounts for 67% of all spam and malicious emails. Malicious emails often originate from recently created generic TLDs like “.bar”, “.makeup”, or “.cyou”, as well as certain country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) employed beyond their geographical implications.
Highest % of spam and malicious emails
Volume share of spam + malicious
Highest % of malicious
Highest % of spam
TLD
Spam + mal %
TLD
Spam + mal %
TLD
Malicious %
TLD
Spam %
.uno
99%
.com
67%
.bar
70%
.autos
93%
.sbs
98%
.shop
5%
.makeup
63%
.today
92%
.best
97%
.net
4%
.cyou
62%
.directory
91%
.beauty
97%
.no
3%
.ml
56%
.boats
87%
.top
97%
.org
2%
.tattoo
54%
.center
85%
.hair
97%
.ru
1%
.om
47%
.monster
80%
.monster
96%
.jp
1%
.cfd
46%
.lol
79%
.cyou
96%
.click
1%
.skin
39%
.hair
78%
.wiki
95%
.beauty
1%
.uno
37%
.shop
78%
.makeup
95%
.cn
1%
.pw
37%
.beauty
77%
Focusing on volume share, “.com” dominates the spam + malicious list at 67%, and is joined in the top 3 by another “classic” gTLD, “.net”, at 4%. They also lead by volume when we look separately at the malicious (68% of all malicious emails are “.com” and “.net”) and spam (71%) categories, as shown below. All of the generic TLDs introduced since 2014 represent 13.4% of spam and malicious and over 14% of only malicious emails. These new TLDs (most of them are only available since 2016) are notable sources of both spam and malicious messages. Meanwhile, country-code TLDs contribute to more than 12% of both categories of unwanted emails.
This breakdown highlights the critical role of both established and new generic TLDs, which surpass older ccTLDs in terms of malicious emails, pointing to the changing dynamics of email-based threats.
Type of TLDs
Spam
Malicious
Spam + malicious
ccTLDs
13%
12%
12%
.com and .net only
71%
68%
71%
new gTLDs
13%
14%
13.4%
That said, “.shop” deserves a highlight of its own. The TLD, which has been available since 2016, is #2 by volume of spam and malicious emails, accounting for 5% of all of those emails. It also represents, when we separate those two categories, 5% of all malicious emails, and 5% of all spam emails. As we’re going to see below, its influence is growing.
Full 2023 top 50 spam & malicious TLDs list
For a more detailed perspective, below we present the top 50 TLDs with the highest percentages of spam and malicious emails during 2023. We also include a breakdown of those two categories.
It’s noticeable that even outside the top 10, other recent generic TLDs are also higher in the ranking, such as “.autos” (the #1 in the spam list), “.today”, “.bid” or “.cam”. TLDs that seem to promise entertainment or fun or are just leisure or recreational related (including “.fun” itself), occupy a position in our top 50 ranking.
2023 Top 50 spam & malicious TLDs (by highest %)
Rank
TLD
Spam %
Malicious %
Spam + malicious %
1
.uno
62%
37%
99%
2
.sbs
64%
35%
98%
3
.best
68%
29%
97%
4
.beauty
77%
20%
97%
5
.top
74%
23%
97%
6
.hair
78%
18%
97%
7
.monster
80%
17%
96%
8
.cyou
34%
62%
96%
9
.wiki
69%
26%
95%
10
.makeup
32%
63%
95%
11
.autos
93%
2%
95%
12
.today
92%
3%
94%
13
.shop
78%
16%
94%
14
.bid
74%
18%
92%
15
.cam
67%
25%
92%
16
.directory
91%
0%
91%
17
.icu
75%
15%
91%
18
.ml
33%
56%
89%
19
.lol
79%
10%
89%
20
.skin
49%
39%
88%
21
.boats
87%
1%
88%
22
.tattoo
34%
54%
87%
23
.click
61%
27%
87%
24
.ltd
70%
17%
86%
25
.rest
74%
11%
86%
26
.center
85%
0%
85%
27
.fun
64%
21%
85%
28
.cfd
39%
46%
84%
29
.bar
14%
70%
84%
30
.bio
72%
11%
84%
31
.tk
66%
17%
83%
32
.yachts
58%
23%
81%
33
.one
63%
17%
80%
34
.ink
68%
10%
78%
35
.wf
76%
1%
77%
36
.no
76%
0%
76%
37
.pw
39%
37%
75%
38
.site
42%
31%
73%
39
.life
56%
16%
72%
40
.homes
62%
10%
72%
41
.services
67%
2%
69%
42
.mom
63%
5%
68%
43
.ir
37%
29%
65%
44
.world
43%
21%
65%
45
.lat
40%
24%
64%
46
.xyz
46%
18%
63%
47
.ee
62%
1%
62%
48
.live
36%
26%
62%
49
.pics
44%
16%
60%
50
.mobi
41%
19%
60%
Change in spam & malicious TLD patterns
Let’s look at TLDs where spam + malicious emails comprised the largest share of total messages from that TLD, and how that list of TLDs changed from the first half of 2023 to the second half. This shows which TLDs were most problematic at different times during the year.
Highlighted in bold in the following table are those TLDs that climbed in the rankings for the percentage of spam and malicious emails from July to December 2023, compared with January to June. Generic TLDs “.uno”, “.makeup” and “.directory” appeared in the top list and in higher positions for the first time in the last six months of the year.
January – June 2023
July – Dec 2023
tld
Spam + malicious %
tld
Spam + malicious %
.click
99%
.uno
99%
.best
99%
.sbs
98%
.yachts
99%
.beauty
97%
.hair
99%
.best
97%
.autos
99%
.makeup
95%
.wiki
98%
.monster
95%
.today
98%
.directory
95%
.mom
98%
.bid
95%
.sbs
97%
.top
93%
.top
97%
.shop
92%
.monster
97%
.today
92%
.beauty
97%
.cam
92%
.bar
96%
.cyou
92%
.rest
95%
.icu
91%
.cam
95%
.boats
88%
.homes
94%
.wiki
88%
.pics
94%
.rest
88%
.lol
94%
.hair
87%
.quest
93%
.fun
87%
.cyou
93%
.cfd
86%
.ink
92%
.skin
85%
.shop
92%
.ltd
84%
.skin
91%
.one
83%
.ltd
91%
.center
83%
.tattoo
91%
.services
81%
.no
90%
.lol
78%
.ml
90%
.wf
78%
.center
90%
.pw
76%
.store
90%
.life
76%
.icu
89%
.click
75%
From the rankings, it’s clear that the recent generic TLDs have the highest spam and malicious percentage of all emails. The top 10 TLDs in both halves of 2023 are all recent and generic, with several introduced since 2021.
Reasons for the prominence of these gTLDs include the availability of domain names that can seem legitimate or mimic well-known brands, as we explain in this blog post. Cybercriminals often use popular or catchy words. Some gTLDs allow anonymous registration. Their low cost and the delay in updated security systems to recognize new gTLDs as spam and malicious sources also play a role — note that, as we’ve seen, cyber criminals also like to change TLDs and methods.
The impact of a lawsuit?
There’s also been a change in the types of domains with the highest malicious percentage in 2023, possibly due to Meta’s lawsuit against Freenom, filed in December 2022 and refiled in March 2023. Freenom provided domain name registry services for free in five ccTLDs, which wound up being used for purposes beyond local businesses or content: “.cf” (Central African Republic), “.ga” (Gabon), “.gq” (Equatorial Guinea), “.ml” (Mali), and “.tk” (Tokelau). However, Freenom stopped new registrations during 2023 following the lawsuit, and in February 2024, announced its decision to exit the domain name business.
Focusing on Freenom TLDs, which appeared in our top 50 ranking only in the first half of 2023, we see a clear shift. Since October, these TLDs have become less relevant in terms of all emails, including malicious and spam percentages. In February 2023, they accounted for 0.17% of all malicious emails we tracked, and 0.04% of all spam and malicious. Their presence has decreased since then, becoming almost non-existent in email volume in September and October, similar to other analyses.
TLDs ordered by volume of spam + malicious
In addition to looking at their share, another way to examine the data is to identify the TLDs that have a higher volume of spam and malicious emails — the next table is ordered that way. This means that we are able to show more familiar (and much older) TLDs, such as “.com”. We’ve included here the percentage of all emails in any given TLD that are classified as spam or malicious, and also spam + malicious to spotlight those that may require more caution. For instance, with high volume “.shop”, “.no”, “.click”, “.beauty”, “.top”, “.monster”, “.autos”, and “.today” stand out with a higher spam and malicious percentage (and also only malicious email percentage).
In the realm of country-code TLDs, Norway’s “.no” leads in spam, followed by China’s “.cn”, Russia’s “.ru”, Ukraine’s “.ua”, and Anguilla’s “.ai”, which recently has been used more for artificial intelligence-related domains than for the country itself.
In bold and red, we’ve highlighted the TLDs where spam + malicious represents more than 20% of all emails in that TLD — already what we consider a high number for domains with a lot of emails.
TLDs with more spam + malicious emails (in volume) in 2023
Rank
TLD
Spam %
Malicious %
Spam + mal %
1
.com
3.6%
0.8%
4.4%
2
.shop
77.8%
16.4%
94.2%
3
.net
2.8%
1.0%
3.9%
4
.no
76.0%
0.3%
76.3%
5
.org
3.3%
1.8%
5.2%
6
.ru
15.2%
7.7%
22.9%
7
.jp
3.4%
2.5%
5.9%
8
.click
60.6%
26.6%
87.2%
9
.beauty
77.0%
19.9%
96.9%
10
.cn
25.9%
3.3%
29.2%
11
.top
73.9%
22.8%
96.6%
12
.monster
79.7%
16.8%
96.5%
13
.de
13.0%
2.1%
15.2%
14
.best
68.1%
29.4%
97.4%
15
.gov
0.6%
2.0%
2.6%
16
.autos
92.6%
2.0%
94.6%
17
.ca
5.2%
0.5%
5.7%
18
.uk
3.2%
0.8%
3.9%
19
.today
91.7%
2.6%
94.3%
20
.io
3.6%
0.5%
4.0%
21
.us
5.7%
1.9%
7.6%
22
.co
6.3%
0.8%
7.1%
23
.biz
27.2%
14.0%
41.2%
24
.edu
0.9%
0.2%
1.1%
25
.info
20.4%
5.4%
25.8%
26
.ai
28.3%
0.1%
28.4%
27
.sbs
63.8%
34.5%
98.3%
28
.it
2.5%
0.3%
2.8%
29
.ua
37.4%
0.6%
38.0%
30
.fr
8.5%
1.0%
9.5%
The curious case of “.gov” email spoofing
When we concentrate our research on message volume to identify TLDs with more malicious emails blocked by our Cloud Email Security service, we discover a trend related to “.gov”.
TLDs ordered by malicious email volume
% of all malicious emails
.com
63%
.net
5%
.shop
5%
.org
3%
.gov
2%
.ru
2%
.jp
2%
.click
1%
.best
0.9%
.beauty
0.8%
The first three domains, “.com” (63%), “.net” (5%), and “.shop” (5%), were previously seen in our rankings and are not surprising. However, in fourth place is “.org”, known for being used by non-profit and other similar organizations, but it has an open registration policy. In fifth place is “.gov”, used only by the US government and administered by CISA. Our investigation suggests that it appears in the ranking because of typical attacks where cybercriminals pretend to be a legitimate address (email spoofing, creation of email messages with a forged sender address). In this case, they use “.gov” when launching attacks.
The spoofing behavior linked to “.gov” is similar to that of other TLDs. It includes fake senders failing SPF validation and other DNS-based authentication methods, along with various other types of attacks. An email failing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks typically indicates that a malicious sender is using an unauthorized IP, domain, or both. So, there are more straightforward ways to block spoofed emails without examining their content for malicious elements.
Ranking TLDs by proportions of malicious and spam email in 2023
In this section, we have included two lists: one ranks TLDs by the highest percentage of malicious emails — those you should exercise greater caution with; the second ranks TLDs by just their spam percentage. These contrast with the previous top 50 list ordered by combined spam and malicious percentages. In the case of malicious emails, the top 3 with the highest percentage are all generic TLDs. The #1 was “.bar”, with 70% of all emails being categorized as malicious, followed by “.makeup”, and “.cyou” — marketed as the phrase “see you”.
The malicious list also includes some country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) not primarily used for country-related topics, like .ml (Mali), .om (Oman), and .pw (Palau). The list also includes other ccTLDs such as .ir (Iran) and .kg (Kyrgyzstan), .lk (Sri Lanka).
In the spam realm, it’s “autos”, with 93%, and other generic TLDs such as “.today”, and “.directory” that take the first three spots, also seeing shares over 90%.
2023 ordered by malicious email %
2023 ordered by spam email %
tld
Malicious %
tld
Spam %
.bar
70%
.autos
93%
.makeup
63%
.today
92%
.cyou
62%
.directory
91%
.ml
56%
.boats
87%
.tattoo
54%
.center
85%
.om
47%
.monster
80%
.cfd
46%
.lol
79%
.skin
39%
.hair
78%
.uno
37%
.shop
78%
.pw
37%
.beauty
77%
.sbs
35%
.no
76%
.site
31%
.wf
76%
.store
31%
.icu
75%
.best
29%
.bid
74%
.ir
29%
.rest
74%
.lk
27%
.top
74%
.work
27%
.bio
72%
.click
27%
.ltd
70%
.wiki
26%
.wiki
69%
.live
26%
.best
68%
.cam
25%
.ink
68%
.lat
24%
.cam
67%
.yachts
23%
.services
67%
.top
23%
.tk
66%
.world
21%
.sbs
64%
.fun
21%
.fun
64%
.beauty
20%
.one
63%
.mobi
19%
.mom
63%
.kg
19%
.uno
62%
.hair
18%
.homes
62%
How it stands in 2024: new higher-risk TLDs
2024 has seen new players enter the high-risk zone for unwanted emails. In this list we have only included the new TLDs that weren’t in the top 50 during 2023, and joined the list in January. New entrants include Samoa’s “.ws”, Indonesia’s “.id” (also used because of its “identification” meaning), and the Cocos Islands’ “.cc”. These ccTLDs, often used for more than just country-related purposes, have shown high percentages of malicious emails, ranging from 20% (.cc) to 95% (.ws) of all emails.
January 2024: Newer TLDs in the top 50 list
TLD
Spam %
Malicious %
Spam + mal %
.ws
3%
95%
98%
.company
96%
0%
96%
.digital
72%
2%
74%
.pro
66%
6%
73%
.tz
62%
4%
65%
.id
13%
39%
51%
.cc
25%
21%
46%
.space
32%
8%
40%
.enterprises
2%
37%
40%
.lv
30%
1%
30%
.cn
26%
3%
29%
.jo
27%
1%
28%
.info
21%
5%
26%
.su
20%
5%
25%
.ua
23%
1%
24%
.museum
0%
24%
24%
.biz
16%
7%
24%
.se
23%
0%
23%
.ai
21%
0%
21%
Overview of email threat trends since 2023
With Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security, we gain insight into the broader email landscape over the past months. The spam percentage of all emails stood at 8.58% in 2023. As mentioned before, keep in mind with these percentages that our protection typically kicks in after other email providers’ filters have already removed some spam and malicious emails.
How about malicious emails? Almost 3% of all emails were flagged as malicious during 2023, with the highest percentages occurring in Q4. Here’s the “malicious” evolution, where we’re also including the January and February 2024 perspective:
The week before Christmas and the first week of 2024 experienced a significant spike in malicious emails, reaching an average of 7% and 8% across the weeks, respectively. Not surprisingly, there was a noticeable decrease during Christmas week, when it dropped to 3%. Other significant increases in the percentage of malicious emails were observed the week before Valentine’s Day, the first week of September (coinciding with returns to work and school in the Northern Hemisphere), and late October.
Threat categories in 2023
We can also look to different types of threats in 2023. Links were present in 49% of all threats. Other categories included extortion (36%), identity deception (27%), credential harvesting (23%), and brand impersonation (18%). These categories are defined and explored in detail in Cloudflare’s 2023 phishing threats report. Extortion saw the most growth in Q4, especially in November and December reaching 38% from 7% of all threats in Q1 2023.
Other trends: Attachments are still popular
Other less “threatening” trends show that 20% of all emails included attachments (as the next chart shows), while 82% contained links in the body. Additionally, 31% were composed in plain text, and 18% featured HTML, which allows for enhanced formatting and visuals. 39% of all emails used remote content.
Conclusion: Be cautious, prepared, safe
The landscape of spam and malicious (or phishing) emails constantly evolves alongside technology, the Internet, user behaviors, use cases, and cybercriminals. As we’ve seen through Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security insights, new generic TLDs have emerged as preferred channels for these malicious activities, highlighting the need for vigilance when dealing with emails from unfamiliar domains.
There’s no shortage of advice on staying safe from phishing. Email remains a ubiquitous yet highly exploited tool in daily business operations. Cybercriminals often bait users into clicking malicious links within emails, a tactic used by both sophisticated criminal organizations and novice attackers. So, always exercise caution online.
Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security provides insights that underscore the importance of robust cybersecurity infrastructure in fighting the dynamic tactics of phishing attacks.
Generative AI has captured the imagination of the world by being able to produce poetry, screenplays, or imagery. These tools can be used to improve human productivity for good causes, but they can also be employed by malicious actors to carry out sophisticated attacks.
We are witnessing phishing attacks and social engineering becoming more sophisticated as attackers tap into powerful new tools to generate credible content or interact with humans as if it was a real person. Attackers can use AI to build boutique tooling made for attacking specific sites with the intent of harvesting proprietary data and taking over user accounts.
To protect against these new challenges, we need new and more sophisticated security tools: this is how Defensive AI was born. Defensive AI is the framework Cloudflare uses when thinking about how intelligent systems can improve the effectiveness of our security solutions. The key to Defensive AI is data generated by Cloudflare’s vast network, whether generally across our entire network or specific to individual customer traffic.
At Cloudflare, we use AI to increase the level of protection across all security areas, ranging from application security to email security and our Zero Trust platform. This includes creating customized protection for every customer for API or email security, or using our huge amount of attack data to train models to detect application attacks that haven’t been discovered yet.
In the following sections, we will provide examples of how we designed the latest generation of security products that leverage AI to secure against AI-powered attacks.
Protecting APIs with anomaly detection
APIs power the modern Web, comprising 57% of dynamic traffic across the Cloudflare network, up from 52% in 2021. While APIs aren’t a new technology, securing them differs from securing a traditional web application. Because APIs offer easy programmatic access by design and are growing in popularity, fraudsters and threat actors have pivoted to targeting APIs. Security teams must now counter this rising threat. Importantly, each API is usually unique in its purpose and usage, and therefore securing APIs can take an inordinate amount of time.
Cloudflare is announcing the development of API Anomaly Detection for API Gateway to protect APIs from attacks designed to damage applications, take over accounts, or exfiltrate data. API Gateway provides a layer of protection between your hosted APIs and every device that interfaces with them, giving you the visibility, control, and security tools you need to manage your APIs.
API Anomaly Detection is an upcoming, ML-powered feature in our API Gateway product suite and a natural successor to Sequence Analytics. In order to protect APIs at scale, API Anomaly Detection learns an application’s business logic by analyzing client API request sequences. It then builds a model of what a sequence of expected requests looks like for that application. The resulting traffic model is used to identify attacks that deviate from the expected client behavior. As a result, API Gateway can use its Sequence Mitigation functionality to enforce the learned model of the application’s intended business logic, stopping attacks.
While we’re still developing API Anomaly Detection, API Gateway customers can sign up here to be included in the beta for API Anomaly Detection. Today, customers can get started with Sequence Analytics and Sequence Mitigation by reviewing the docs. Enterprise customers that haven’t purchased API Gateway can self-start a trial in the Cloudflare Dashboard, or contact their account manager for more information.
Identifying unknown application vulnerabilities
Another area where AI improves security is in our Web Application Firewall (WAF). Cloudflare processes 55 million HTTP requests per second on average and has an unparalleled visibility into attacks and exploits across the world targeting a wide range of applications.
One of the big challenges with the WAF is adding protections for new vulnerabilities and false positives. A WAF is a collection of rules designed to identify attacks directed at web applications. New vulnerabilities are discovered daily and at Cloudflare we have a team of security analysts that create new rules when vulnerabilities are discovered. However, manually creating rules takes time — usually hours — leaving applications potentially vulnerable until a protection is in place. The other problem is that attackers continuously evolve and mutate existing attack payloads that can potentially bypass existing rules.
This is why Cloudflare has, for years, leveraged machine learning models that constantly learn from the latest attacks, deploying mitigations without the need for manual rule creation. This can be seen, for example, in our WAF Attack Score solution. WAF Attack Score is based on an ML model trained on attack traffic identified on the Cloudflare network. The resulting classifier allows us to identify variations and bypasses of existing attacks as well as extending the protection to new and undiscovered attacks. Recently, we have made Attack Score available to all Enterprise and Business plans.
Attack Score uses AI to classify each HTTP request based on the likelihood that it’s malicious
While the contribution of security analysts is indispensable, in the era of AI and rapidly evolving attack payloads, a robust security posture demands solutions that do not rely on human operators to write rules for each novel threat. Combining Attack Score with traditional signature-based rules is an example of how intelligent systems can support tasks carried out by humans. Attack Score identifies new malicious payloads which can be used by analysts to optimize rules that, in turn, provide better training data for our AI models. This creates a reinforcing positive feedback loop improving the overall protection and response time of our WAF.
Long term, we will adapt the AI model to account for customer-specific traffic characteristics to better identify deviations from normal and benign traffic.
Using AI to fight phishing
Email is one of the most effective vectors leveraged by bad actors with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reporting that 90% of cyber attacks start with phishing and Cloudflare Email Security marking 2.6% of 2023’s emails as malicious. The rise of AI-enhanced attacks are making traditional email security providers obsolete, as threat actors can now craft phishing emails that are more credible than ever with little to no language errors.
Cloudflare Email Security is a cloud-native service that stops phishing attacks across all threat vectors. Cloudflare’s email security product continues to protect customers with its AI models, even as trends like Generative AI continue to evolve. Cloudflare’s models analyze all parts of a phishing attack to determine the risk posed to the end user. Some of our AI models are personalized for each customer while others are trained holistically. Privacy is paramount at Cloudflare, so only non-personally identifiable information is used by our tools for training. In 2023, Cloudflare processed approximately 13 billion, and blocked 3.4 billion, emails, providing the email security product a rich dataset that can be used to train AI models.
Two detections that are part of our portfolio are Honeycomb and Labyrinth.
Honeycomb is a patented email sender domain reputation model. This service builds a graph of who is sending messages and builds a model to determine risk. Models are trained on specific customer traffic patterns, so every customer has AI models trained on what their good traffic looks like.
Labyrinth uses ML to protect on a per-customer basis. Actors attempt to spoof emails from our clients’ valid partner companies. We can gather a list with statistics of known & good email senders for each of our clients. We can then detect the spoof attempts when the email is sent by someone from an unverified domain, but the domain mentioned in the email itself is a reference/verified domain.
AI remains at the core of our email security product, and we are constantly improving the ways we leverage it within our product. If you want to get more information about how we are using our AI models to stop AI enhanced phishing attacks check out our blog post here.
Zero-Trust security protected and powered by AI
Cloudflare Zero Trust provides administrators the tools to protect access to their IT infrastructure by enforcing strict identity verification for every person and device regardless of whether they are sitting within or outside the network perimeter.
One of the big challenges is to enforce strict access control while reducing the friction introduced by frequent verifications. Existing solutions also put pressure on IT teams that need to analyze log data to track how risk is evolving within their infrastructure. Sifting through a huge amount of data to find rare attacks requires large teams and substantial budgets.
Cloudflare simplifies this process by introducing behavior-based user risk scoring. Leveraging AI, we analyze real-time data to identify anomalies in the users’ behavior and signals that could lead to harms to the organization. This provides administrators with recommendations on how to tailor the security posture based on user behavior.
Zero Trust user risk scoring detects user activity and behaviors that could introduce risk to your organizations, systems, and data and assigns a score of Low, Medium, or High to the user involved. This approach is sometimes referred to as user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) and enables teams to detect and remediate possible account compromise, company policy violations, and other risky activity.
The first contextual behavior we are launching is “impossible travel”, which helps identify if a user’s credentials are being used in two locations that the user could not have traveled to in that period of time. These risk scores can be further extended in the future to highlight personalized behavior risks based on contextual information such as time of day usage patterns and access patterns to flag any anomalous behavior. Since all traffic would be proxying through your SWG, this can also be extended to resources which are being accessed, like an internal company repo.
From application and email security to network security and Zero Trust, we are witnessing attackers leveraging new technologies to be more effective in achieving their goals. In the last few years, multiple Cloudflare product and engineering teams have adopted intelligent systems to better identify abuses and increase protection.
Besides the generative AI craze, AI is already a crucial part of how we defend digital assets against attacks and how we discourage bad actors.
In an era dominated by digital landscapes, protecting your brand’s identity has become more challenging than ever. Malicious actors regularly build lookalike websites, complete with official logos and spoofed domains, to try to dupe customers and employees. These kinds of phishing attacks can damage your reputation, erode customer trust, or even result in data breaches.
In March 2023 we introduced Cloudflare’s Brand and Phishing Protection suite, beginning with Brand Domain Name Alerts. This tool recognizes so-called “confusable” domains (which can be nearly indistinguishable from their authentic counterparts) by sifting through the trillions of DNS requests passing through Cloudflare’s DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1. This helps brands and organizations stay ahead of malicious actors by spotting suspicious domains as soon as they appear in the wild.
Today we are excited to expand our Brand Protection toolkit with the addition of Logo Matching. Logo Matching is a powerful tool that allows brands to detect unauthorized logo usage: if Cloudflare detects your logo on an unauthorized site, you receive an immediate notification.
The new Logo Matching feature is a direct result of a frequent request from our users. Phishing websites often use official brand logos as part of their facade. In fact, the appearance of unauthorized logos is a strong signal that a hitherto dormant suspicious domain is being weaponized. Being able to identify these sites before they are widely distributed is a powerful tool in defending against phishing attacks. Organizations can use Cloudflare Gateway to block employees from connecting to sites with a suspicious domain and unauthorized logo use.
Imagine having the power to fortify your brand’s presence and reputation. By detecting instances where your logo is being exploited, you gain the upper hand in protecting your brand from potential fraud and phishing attacks.
Getting started with Logo Matching
For most brands, the first step to leveraging Logo Matching will be to configure Domain Name Alerts. For example, we might decide to set up an alert for example.com, which will use fuzzy matching to detect lookalike, high-risk domain names. All sites that trigger an alert are automatically analyzed by Cloudflare’s phishing scanner, which gathers technical information about each site, including SSL certificate data, HTTP request and response data, page performance data, DNS records, and more — all of which inform a machine-learning based phishing risk analysis.
Logo Matching further extends this scan by looking for matching images. The system leverages image recognition algorithms to crawl through scanned domains, identifying matches even when images have undergone slight modifications or alterations.
Once configured, Domain Name Alerts and the scans they trigger will continue on an ongoing basis. In addition, Logo Matching monitors for images across all domains scanned by Cloudflare’s phishing scanner, including those scanned by other Brand Protection users, as well as scans initiated via the Cloudflare Radar URL scanner, and the Investigate Portal within Cloudflare’s Security Center dashboard.
How we built Logo Matching for Brand Protection
Under the hood of our API Insights
Now, let’s dive deeper into the engine powering this feature – our Brand Protection API. This API serves as the backbone of the entire process. Not only does it enable users to submit logos and brand images for scanning, but it also orchestrates the complex matching process.
When a logo is submitted through the API, the Logo Matching feature not only identifies potential matches but also allows customers to save a query, providing an easy way to refer back to their queries and see the most recent results. If a customer chooses to save a query, the logo is swiftly added to our data storage in R2, Cloudflare’s zero egress fee object storage. This foundational feature enables us to continuously provide updated results without the customer having to create a new query for the same logo.
The API ensures real-time responses for logo submissions, simultaneously kick-starting our internal scanning pipelines. An image look-back ID is generated to facilitate seamless tracking and processing of logo submissions. This identifier allows us to keep a record of the submitted images, ensuring that we can efficiently manage and process them through our system.
Scan result retrieval
As images undergo scanning, the API remains the conduit for result retrieval. Its role here is to constantly monitor and provide the results in real time. During scanning, the API ensures users receive timely updates. If scanning is still in progress, a “still scanning” status is communicated. Upon completion, the API is designed to relay crucial information — details on matches if found, or a simple “no matches” declaration.
Storing and maintaining logo data
In the background, we maintain a vectorized version of all user-uploaded logos when the user query is saved. This system, acting as a logo matching subscriber, is entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring accurate and up-to-date logo matching.
To accomplish this, two strategies come into play. Firstly, the subscriber stays attuned to revisions in the logo set. It saves vectorized logo sets with every revision and regular checks are conducted by the subscriber to ensure alignment between the vectorized logos and those saved in the database.
While monitoring the query, the subscriber employs a diff-based strategy. This recalibrates the vectorized logo set against the current logos stored in the database, ensuring a seamless transition into processing.
Shaping the future of brand protection: our roadmap ahead
With the introduction of the Logo Matching feature, Cloudflare’s Brand Protection suite advances to the next level of brand integrity management. By enabling you to detect and analyze, and act on unauthorized logo usage, we’re helping businesses to take better care of their brand identity.
At Cloudflare, we’re committed to shaping a comprehensive brand protection solution that anticipates and mitigates risks proactively. In the future, we plan to add enhancements to our brand protection solution with features like automated cease and desist letters for swift legal action against unauthorized logo use, proactive domain monitoring upon onboarding, simplified reporting of brand impersonations and more.
Getting started
If you’re an Enterprise customer, sign up for Beta Access for Brand protection now to gain access to private scanning for your domains, logo matching, save queries and set up alerts on matched domains. Learn more about Brand Protection here.
In 2023, cybersecurity continues to be in most cases a need-to-have for those who don’t want to take chances on getting caught in a cyberattack and its consequences. Attacks have gotten more sophisticated, while conflicts (online and offline, and at the same time) continue, including in Ukraine. Governments have heightened their cyber warnings and put together strategies, including around critical infrastructure (including health and education). All of this, at a time when there were never so many online risks, but also people online — over five billion in July 2023, 64.5% of the now eight billion that are the world’s total population.
Here we take a look at what we’ve been discussing in 2023, so far, in our Cloudflare blog related to attacks and online security in general, with several August reading list suggestions. From new trends, products, initiatives or partnerships, including AI service safety, to record-breaking blocked cyberattacks. On that note, our AI hub (ai.cloudflare.com) was just launched.
Throughout the year, Cloudflare has continued to onboard customers while they were being attacked, and we have provided protection to many others, including once.net, responsible for the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest online voting system — the European event reached 162 million people.
Our global network — a.k.a. Supercloud — gives us a unique vantage point. Cloudflare’s extensive scale also helps enhance security, with preventive services powered by machine learning, like our recent WAF attack scoring system to stop attacks before they become known or even malware.
Recently, we announced our presence in more than 300 cities across over 100 countries, with interconnections to over 12,000 networks and still growing. We provide services for around 20% of websites online and to millions of Internet properties.
Attacks increasing. A readiness and trust game
Let’s start with providing some context. There are all sorts of attacks, but they have been, generally speaking, increasing. In Q2 2023, Cloudflare blocked an average of 140 billion cyber threats per day. One year ago, when we wrote a similar blog post, it was 124 billion, a 13% increase year over year. Attackers are not holding back, with more sophisticated attacks rising, and sectors such as education or healthcare as the target.
Artificial intelligence (AI), like machine learning, is not new, but it has been trending in 2023, and certain capabilities are more generally available. This has raised concerns about the quality of deception and even AI hackers.
This year, governments have also continued to release reports and warnings. In 2022, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) created the Shields Up initiative in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In March 2023, the Biden-Harris Administration released the National Cybersecurity Strategy aimed at securing the Internet.
That said, here are the reading suggestions related to more general country related attacks, but also policy and trust cybersecurity:
One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience (✍️)
This blog post reports on Internet insights during the war in Europe, and discusses how Ukraine's Internet remained resilient in spite of dozens of attacks, and disruptions in three different stages of the conflict.
Application-layer cyber attacks in Ukraine rose 1,300% in early March 2022 compared to pre-war levels.
The White House’s National Cybersecurity Strategy asks the private sector to step up to fight cyber attacks. Cloudflare is ready (✍️)
The White House released in March 2023 the National Cybersecurity Strategy aimed at preserving and extending the open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and securing the Internet. Cloudflare welcomed the Strategy, and the much-needed policy initiative, highlighting the need of defending critical infrastructure, where Zero Trust plays a big role. In the same month, Cloudflare announced its commitment to the 2023 Summit for Democracy. Also related to these initiatives, in March 2022, we launched our very own Critical Infrastructure Defense Project (CIDP), and in December 2022, Cloudflare launched Project Safekeeping, offering Zero Trust solutions to certain eligible entities in Australia, Japan, Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
Secure by default: recommendations from the CISA’s newest guide, and how Cloudflare follows these principles to keep you secure (✍️)
In this April 2023 post we reviewed the “default secure” posture, and recommendations that were the focus of a recently published guide jointly authored by several international agencies. It had US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and New Zealand contributions. Long story short, using all sorts of tools, machine learning and a secure-by-default and by-design approach, and a few principles, will make all the difference.
Nine years of Project Galileo and how the last year has changed it (✍️) + Project Galileo Report (✍️)
Between July 1, 2022, and May 5, 2023, Cloudflare mitigated 20 billion attacks against organizations protected under Project Galileo. This is an average of nearly 67.7 million cyber attacks per day over the last 10 months.
For LGBTQ+ organizations, we saw an average of 790,000 attacks mitigated per day over the last 10 months, with a majority of those classified as DDoS attacks.
Attacks targeting civil society organizations are generally increasing. We have broken down an attack aimed at a prominent organization, with the request volume climbing as high as 667,000 requests per second. Before and after this time the organization saw little to no traffic.
In Ukraine, spikes in traffic to organizations that provide emergency response and disaster relief coincide with bombings of the country over the 10-month period.
Project Cybersafe Schools: bringing security tools for free to small K-12 school districts in the US (✍️)
Already in August 2023, Cloudflare introduced an initiative aimed at small K-12 public school districts: Project Cybersafe Schools. Announced as part of the Back to School Safely: K-12 Cybersecurity Summit at the White House on August 7, Project Cybersafe Schools will support eligible K-12 public school districts with a package of Zero Trust cybersecurity solutions — for free, and with no time limit. In Q2 2023, Cloudflare blocked an average of 70 million cyber threats each day targeting the U.S. education sector, and a 47% increase in DDoS attacks quarter-over-quarter.
Privacy concerns also go hand in hand with security online, and we’ve provided further details on this topic earlier this year in relation to our investment in security to protect data privacy. Cloudflare also achieved a new EU Cloud Code of Conduct privacy validation.
This is what a record-breaking DDoS attack (exceeding 71 million requests per second) looks like.
DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service) are not new, but they’re still one of the main tools used by attackers. In Q2 2023, Cloudflare witnessed an unprecedented escalation in DDoS attack sophistication, and our report delves into this phenomenon. Pro-Russian hacktivists REvil, Killnet and Anonymous Sudan joined forces to attack Western sites. Mitel vulnerability exploits surged by a whopping 532%, and attacks on crypto rocketed up by 600%. Also, more broadly, attacks exceeding three hours have increased by 103% quarter-over-quarter.
This blog post and the corresponding Cloudflare Radar report shed light on some of these trends. On the other hand, in our Q1 2023 DDoS threat report, a surge in hyper-volumetric attacks that leverage a new generation of botnets that are comprised of Virtual Private Servers (VPS) was observed.
Killnet and AnonymousSudan DDoS attack Australian university websites, and threaten more attacks — here’s what to do about it (✍️)
In late March 2023, Cloudflare observed HTTP DDoS attacks targeting university websites in Australia. Universities were the first of several groups publicly targeted by the pro-Russian hacker group Killnet and their affiliate AnonymousSudan. This post not only shows a trend with these organized groups targeted attacks but also provides specific recommendations.
In January 2023, something similar was seen with increased cyberattacks to Holocaust educational websites protected by Cloudflare’s Project Galileo.
Uptick in healthcare organizations experiencing targeted DDoS attacks (✍️)
In early February 2023, Cloudflare, as well as other sources, observed an uptick in healthcare organizations targeted by a pro-Russian hacktivist group claiming to be Killnet. There was an increase in the number of these organizations seeking our help to defend against such attacks. Additionally, healthcare organizations that were already protected by Cloudflare experienced mitigated HTTP DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71 million request-per-second DDoS attack (✍️)
Also in early February, Cloudflare detected and mitigated dozens of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, one of those that became a record-breaking one. The majority of attacks peaked in the ballpark of 50-70 million requests per second (rps) with the largest exceeding 71Mrps. This was the largest reported HTTP DDoS attack on record to date, more than 54% higher than the previous reported record of 46M rps in June 2022.
SLP: a new DDoS amplification vector in the wild (✍️)
This blog post from April 2023 highlights how researchers have published the discovery of a new DDoS reflection/amplification attack vector leveraging the SLP protocol (Service Location Protocol). The prevalence of SLP-based DDoS attacks is also expected to rise, but our automated DDoS protection system keeps Cloudflare customers safe.
Additionally, this year, also in April, a new and improved Network Analytics dashboard was introduced, providing security professionals insights into their DDoS attack and traffic landscape.
For the second year in a row we published our Application Security Report. There’s a lot to unpack here, in a year when, according to Netcraft, Cloudflare became the most commonly used web server vendor within the top million sites (it has now a 22% market share). Here are some highlights:
6% of daily HTTP requests (proxied by the Cloudflare network) are mitigated on average. It’s down two percentage points compared to last year.
DDoS mitigation accounts for more than 50% of all mitigated traffic, so it’s still the largest contributor to mitigated layer 7 (application layer) HTTP requests.
Compared to last year, however, mitigation by the Cloudflare WAF (Web Application Firewall) has grown significantly, and now accounts for nearly 41% of mitigated requests.
HTTP Anomaly (examples include malformed method names, null byte characters in headers, etc.) is the most frequent layer 7 attack vectors mitigated by the WAF.
30% of HTTP traffic is automated (bot traffic). 55% of dynamic (non cacheable) traffic is API related. 65% of global API traffic is generated by browsers.
16% of non-verified bot HTTP traffic is mitigated.
HTTP Anomaly surpasses SQLi (code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications) as the most common attack vector on API endpoints. Brute force account takeover attacks are increasing. Also, Microsoft Exchange is attacked more than WordPress.
How Cloudflare can help stop malware before it reaches your app (✍️)
In April 2023, we made the job of application security teams easier, by providing a content scanning engine integrated with our Web Application Firewall (WAF), so that malicious files being uploaded by end users, never reach origin servers in the first place. Since September 2022, our Cloudflare WAF became smarter in helping stop attacks before they are known.
Announcing WAF Attack Score Lite and Security Analytics for business customers (✍️)
In March 2023, we announced that our machine learning empowered WAF and Security analytics view were made available to our Business plan customers, to help detect and stop attacks before they are known. In a nutshell: Early detection + Powerful mitigation = Safer Internet. Or:
Phishing remains the primary way to breach organizations. According to CISA, 90% of cyber attacks begin with it. The FBI has been publishing Internet Crime Reports, and in the most recent, phishing continues to be ranked #1 in the top five Internet crime types. Reported phishing crimes and victim losses increased by 1038% since 2018, reaching 300,497 incidents in 2022. The FBI also referred to Business Email Compromise as the $43 billion problem facing organizations, with complaints increasing by 127% in 2022, resulting in $3.31 billion in related losses, compared to 2021.
In 2022, Cloudflare Area 1 kept 2.3 billion unwanted messages out of customer inboxes. This year, that number will be easily surpassed.
In August 2023, Cloudflare published its first phishing threats report — fully available here. The report explores key phishing trends and related recommendations, based on email security data from May 2022 to May 2023.
Some takeaways include how attackers using deceptive links was the #1 phishing tactic — and how they are evolving how they get you to click and when they weaponize the link. Also, identity deception takes multiple forms (including business email compromise (BEC) and brand impersonation), and can easily bypass email authentication standards.
More than one year ago, Cloudflare acquired Area 1 Security, and with that we added to our Cloudflare Zero Trust platform an essential cloud-native email security service that identifies and blocks attacks before they hit user inboxes. This year, we’ve obtained one of the best ways to provide customers assurance that the sensitive information they send to us can be kept safe: a SOC 2 Type II report.
Email Link Isolation: your safety net for the latest phishing attacks (✍️)
Back in January, during our CIO Week, Email Link Isolation was made generally available to all our customers. What is it? A safety net for the suspicious links that end up in inboxes and that users may click — anyone can click on the wrong link by mistake. This added protection turns Cloudflare Area 1 into the most comprehensive email security solution when it comes to protecting against malware, phishing attacks, etc. Also, in true Cloudflare fashion, it’s a one-click deployment.
Phishing attacks come in all sorts of ways to fool people. This high level “phish” guide, goes over the different types — while email is definitely the most common, there are others —, and provides some tips to help you catch these scams before you fall for them.
Top 50 most impersonated brands in phishing attacks and new tools you can use to protect your employees from them (✍️)
Here we go over arguably one of the hardest challenges any security team is constantly facing, detecting, blocking, and mitigating the risks of phishing attacks. During our Security Week in March, a Top 50 list of the most impersonated brands in phishing attacks was presented (spoiler alert: AT&T Inc., PayPal, and Microsoft are on the podium).
Additionally, it was also announced the expansion of the phishing protections available to Cloudflare One customers by automatically identifying — and blocking — so-called “confusable” domains. What is Cloudflare One? It’s our suite of products that provides a customizable, and integrated with what a company already uses, Zero Trust network-as-a-service platform. It’s built for that already mentioned ease of mind and fearless online use. Cloudflare One, along with the use of physical security keys, was what thwarted the sophisticated “Oktapus” phishing attack targeting Cloudflare employees last summer.
Groundbreaking technology brings groundbreaking challenges. Cloudflare has experience protecting some of the largest AI applications in the world, and in this blog post there are some tips and best practices for securing generative AI applications. Success in consumer-facing applications inherently expose the underlying AI systems to millions of users, vastly increasing the potential attack surface.
Using the power of Cloudflare’s global network to detect malicious domains using machine learning (✍️)
Taking into account the objective of preventing threats before they create havoc, here we go over that Cloudflare recently developed proprietary models leveraging machine learning and other advanced analytical techniques. These are able to detect security threats that take advantage of the domain name system (DNS), known as the phonebook of the Internet.
How sophisticated scammers and phishers are preying on customers of Silicon Valley Bank (✍️)
In order to breach trust and trick unsuspecting victims, threat actors overwhelmingly use topical events as lures. The news about what happened at Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year was one of the latest events to watch out for and stay vigilant against opportunistic phishing campaigns using SVB as the lure. At that time, Cloudforce One (Cloudflare’s threat operations and research team) significantly increased our brand monitoring focused on SVB’s digital presence.
How Cloudflare can help stop malware before it reaches your app (✍️)
In April 2023, Cloudflare launched a tool to make the job of application security teams easier, by providing a content scanning engine integrated with our Web Application Firewall (WAF), so that malicious files being uploaded by end users, never reach origin servers in the first place.
Analyze any URL safely using the Cloudflare Radar URL Scanner (✍️)
Cloudflare Radar is our free platform for Internet insights. In March, our URL Scanner was launched, allowing anyone to analyze a URL safely. The report that it creates contains a myriad of technical details, including a phishing scan. Many users have been using it for security reasons, but others are just exploring what’s under-the-hood look at any webpage.
Unmasking the top exploited vulnerabilities of 2022 (✍️)
Last, but not least, already from August 2023, this blog post focuses on the most commonly exploited vulnerabilities, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Given Cloudflare’s role as a reverse proxy to a large portion of the Internet, we delve into how the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) mentioned by CISA are being exploited on the Internet, and a bit of what has been learned.
If you want to learn about making a website more secure (and faster) while loading third-party tools like Google Analytics 4, Facebook CAPI, TikTok, and others, you can get to know our Cloudflare Zaraz solution. It reached general availability in July 2023.
Wrap up
“The Internet was not built for what it has become”.
This is how one of Cloudflare’s S-1 document sections begins. It is also commonly referenced in our blog to show how this remarkable experiment, the network of networks, wasn’t designed for the role it now plays in our daily lives and work. Security, performance and privacy are crucial in a time when anyone can be the target of an attack, threat, or vulnerability. While AI can aid in mitigating attacks, it also adds complexity to attackers' tactics.
With that in mind, as we've highlighted in this 2023 reading list suggestions/online attacks guide, prioritizing the prevention of detrimental attack outcomes remains the optimal strategy. Hopefully, it will make some of the attacks on your company go unnoticed or be consequences-free, or even transform them into interesting stories to share when you access your security dashboard.
If you're interested in exploring specific examples, you can delve into case studies within our hub, where you’ll find security related stories from different institutions. From a technology company like Sage, to the State of Arizona, or the Republic of Estonia Information Security Authority, and even Cybernews, a cybersecurity news media outlet.
And because the future of a private and secure Internet is also in our minds, it's worth mentioning that in March 2022, Cloudflare enabled post-quantum cryptography support for all our customers. The topic of post-quantum cryptography, designed to be secure against the threat of quantum computers, is quite interesting and worth some delving into, but even without knowing what it is, it’s good to know that protection is already here.
If you want to try some security features mentioned, the Cloudflare Security Center is a good place to start (free plans included). The same applies to our Zero Trust ecosystem (or Cloudflare One as our SASE, Secure Access Service Edge) that is available as self-serve, and also includes a free plan. This vendor-agnostic roadmap shows the general advantages of the Zero Trust architecture, and as we’ve seen, there’s also one focused on high risk organizations.
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