Tag Archives: Threat Analysis Group

Identifying vulnerabilities and protecting you from phishing

Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) works to counter targeted and government-backed hacking against Google and the people who use our products. Following our November update, today we’re sharing the latest insights to fight phishing, and for security teams, providing more details about our work identifying attacks against zero-day vulnerabilities. 

Protecting you from phishing

We have a long-standing policy to send you a warning if we detect that your account is a target of government-backed phishing or malware attempts. In 2019, we sent almost 40,000 warnings, a nearly 25 percent drop from 2018. One reason for this decline is that our new protections are working—attackers' efforts have been slowed down and they’re more deliberate in their attempts, meaning attempts are happening less frequently as attackers adapt.

Distribution of the targets of government-backed phishing in 2019

Distribution of the targets of government-backed phishing in 2019.

We’ve detected a few emerging trends in recent months.

Impersonating news outlets and journalists is on the rise

Upon reviewing phishing attempts since the beginning of this year, we’ve seen a rising number of attackers, including those from Iran and North Korea, impersonating news outlets or journalists. For example, attackers impersonate a journalist to seed false stories with other reporters to spread disinformation. In other cases, attackers will send several benign emails to build a rapport with a journalist or foreign policy expert before sending a malicious attachment in a follow up email. Government-backed attackers regularly target foreign policy experts for their research, access to the organizations they work with, and connection to fellow researchers or policymakers for subsequent attacks. 

Heavily targeted sectors are (mostly) not surprising

Government-backed attackers continue to consistently target geopolitical rivals, government officials, journalists, dissidents and activists. The chart below details the Russian threat actor group SANDWORM’s targeting efforts (by sector) over the last three years.

Distribution of targets by sector by the Russian threat actor known as SANDWORM

Government-backed attackers repeatedly go after their targets

In 2019, one in five accounts that received a warning was targeted multiple times by attackers. If at first the attacker does not succeed, they’ll try again using a different lure, different account, or trying to compromise an associate of their target.

We’ve yet to see people successfully phished if they participate in Google’s Advanced Protection Program (APP), even if they are repeatedly targeted. APP provides the strongest protections available against phishing and account hijacking and is specifically designed for the highest-risk accounts. 

Finding attacks that leverage zero-day vulnerabilities

Zero-day vulnerabilities are unknown software flaws. Until they’re identified and fixed, they can be exploited by attackers. TAG actively hunts for these types of attacks because they are particularly dangerous and have a high rate of success, although they account for a small number of the overall total. When we find an attack that takes advantage of  a zero-day vulnerability, we report the vulnerability to the vendor and give them seven days to patch or produce an advisory or we release an advisory ourselves. 

We work across all platforms, and in 2019 TAG discovered zero-day vulnerabilities affecting Android, Chrome, iOS, Internet Explorer and Windows. Most recently, TAG was acknowledged in January 2020 for our contribution in identifying CVE-2020-0674, a remote code execution vulnerability in Internet Explorer. 

Last year, TAG discovered that a single threat actor was capitalizing on five zero-day vulnerabilities. Finding this many zero-day exploits from the same actor in a relatively short time frame is rare. The exploits were delivered via compromised legitimate websites (e.g. watering hole attacks), links to malicious websites, and email attachments in limited spear phishing campaigns. The majority of targets we observed were from North Korea or individuals who worked on North Korea-related issues.

For security teams interested in learning more, here are additional details about the exploits and our work in 2019:

The vulnerabilities underlying these exploits included:

The following technical details are associated with the exploits and can be used for teams interested in conducting further research on these attacks:

  • CVE-2018-8653, CVE-2019-1367 and CVE-2020-0674 are vulnerabilities inside jscript.dll, therefore all exploits enabled IE8 rendering and used JScript.Compact as JS engine.

  • In most Internet Explorer exploits, attackers abused the Enumerator object in order to gain remote code execution. 

  • To escape from the Internet Explorer EPM sandbox, exploits used a technique consisting of replaying the same vulnerability inside svchost by abusing Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPad) Service. Attackers abused this technique with CVE-2020-0674 on Firefox to escape the sandbox after exploiting CVE-2019-17026.

  • CVE-2019-0676 is a variant of CVE-2017-0022, CVE-2016-3298, CVE-2016-0162 and CVE-2016-3351 where the vulnerability resided inside the handling of “res://” URI scheme. Exploiting CVE-2019-0676 enabled attackers to reveal presence or non-presence of files on the victim’s computer; this information was later used to decide whether or not a second stage exploit should be delivered.

  • The attack vector for CVE-2019-1367 was rather atypical as the exploit was delivered from an Office document abusing the online video embedding feature to load an external URL conducting the exploitation.

Our Threat Analyst Group will continue to identify bad actors and share relevant information with others in the industry. Our goal is to bring awareness to these issues to protect you and fight bad actors to prevent future attacks. In a future update, we’ll provide details on attackers using lures related to COVID-19 and expected behavior we’re observing (all within the normal range of attacker activity). 

Identifying vulnerabilities and protecting you from phishing

Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) works to counter targeted and government-backed hacking against Google and the people who use our products. Following our November update, today we’re sharing the latest insights to fight phishing, and for security teams, providing more details about our work identifying attacks against zero-day vulnerabilities. 

Protecting you from phishing

We have a long-standing policy to send you a warning if we detect that your account is a target of government-backed phishing or malware attempts. In 2019, we sent almost 40,000 warnings, a nearly 25 percent drop from 2018. One reason for this decline is that our new protections are working—attackers' efforts have been slowed down and they’re more deliberate in their attempts, meaning attempts are happening less frequently as attackers adapt.

Distribution of the targets of government-backed phishing in 2019

Distribution of the targets of government-backed phishing in 2019.

We’ve detected a few emerging trends in recent months.

Impersonating news outlets and journalists is on the rise

Upon reviewing phishing attempts since the beginning of this year, we’ve seen a rising number of attackers, including those from Iran and North Korea, impersonating news outlets or journalists. For example, attackers impersonate a journalist to seed false stories with other reporters to spread disinformation. In other cases, attackers will send several benign emails to build a rapport with a journalist or foreign policy expert before sending a malicious attachment in a follow up email. Government-backed attackers regularly target foreign policy experts for their research, access to the organizations they work with, and connection to fellow researchers or policymakers for subsequent attacks. 

Heavily targeted sectors are (mostly) not surprising

Government-backed attackers continue to consistently target geopolitical rivals, government officials, journalists, dissidents and activists. The chart below details the Russian threat actor group SANDWORM’s targeting efforts (by sector) over the last three years.

Distribution of targets by sector by the Russian threat actor known as SANDWORM

Government-backed attackers repeatedly go after their targets

In 2019, one in five accounts that received a warning was targeted multiple times by attackers. If at first the attacker does not succeed, they’ll try again using a different lure, different account, or trying to compromise an associate of their target.

We’ve yet to see people successfully phished if they participate in Google’s Advanced Protection Program (APP), even if they are repeatedly targeted. APP provides the strongest protections available against phishing and account hijacking and is specifically designed for the highest-risk accounts. 

Finding attacks that leverage zero-day vulnerabilities

Zero-day vulnerabilities are unknown software flaws. Until they’re identified and fixed, they can be exploited by attackers. TAG actively hunts for these types of attacks because they are particularly dangerous and have a high rate of success, although they account for a small number of the overall total. When we find an attack that takes advantage of  a zero-day vulnerability, we report the vulnerability to the vendor and give them seven days to patch or produce an advisory or we release an advisory ourselves. 

We work across all platforms, and in 2019 TAG discovered zero-day vulnerabilities affecting Android, Chrome, iOS, Internet Explorer and Windows. Most recently, TAG was acknowledged in January 2020 for our contribution in identifying CVE-2020-0674, a remote code execution vulnerability in Internet Explorer. 

Last year, TAG discovered that a single threat actor was capitalizing on five zero-day vulnerabilities. Finding this many zero-day exploits from the same actor in a relatively short time frame is rare. The exploits were delivered via compromised legitimate websites (e.g. watering hole attacks), links to malicious websites, and email attachments in limited spear phishing campaigns. The majority of targets we observed were from North Korea or individuals who worked on North Korea-related issues.

For security teams interested in learning more, here are additional details about the exploits and our work in 2019:

The vulnerabilities underlying these exploits included:

The following technical details are associated with the exploits and can be used for teams interested in conducting further research on these attacks:

  • CVE-2018-8653, CVE-2019-1367 and CVE-2020-0674 are vulnerabilities inside jscript.dll, therefore all exploits enabled IE8 rendering and used JScript.Compact as JS engine.

  • In most Internet Explorer exploits, attackers abused the Enumerator object in order to gain remote code execution. 

  • To escape from the Internet Explorer EPM sandbox, exploits used a technique consisting of replaying the same vulnerability inside svchost by abusing Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPad) Service. Attackers abused this technique with CVE-2020-0674 on Firefox to escape the sandbox after exploiting CVE-2019-17026.

  • CVE-2019-0676 is a variant of CVE-2017-0022, CVE-2016-3298, CVE-2016-0162 and CVE-2016-3351 where the vulnerability resided inside the handling of “res://” URI scheme. Exploiting CVE-2019-0676 enabled attackers to reveal presence or non-presence of files on the victim’s computer; this information was later used to decide whether or not a second stage exploit should be delivered.

  • The attack vector for CVE-2019-1367 was rather atypical as the exploit was delivered from an Office document abusing the online video embedding feature to load an external URL conducting the exploitation.

Our Threat Analyst Group will continue to identify bad actors and share relevant information with others in the industry. Our goal is to bring awareness to these issues to protect you and fight bad actors to prevent future attacks. In a future update, we’ll provide details on attackers using lures related to COVID-19 and expected behavior we’re observing (all within the normal range of attacker activity). 

Protecting users from government-backed hacking and disinformation

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) works to counter targeted and government-backed hacking against Google and our users. This is an area we have invested in deeply for over a decade. Our daily work involves detecting and defeating threats, and warning targeted users and customers about the world’s most sophisticated adversaries, spanning the full range of Google products including Gmail, Drive and YouTube.

In the past, we’ve posted on issues like phishing campaigns, vulnerabilities and disinformation. Going forward, we’ll share more technical details and data about the threats we detect and how we counter them to advance the broader digital security discussion.

TAG tracks more than 270 targeted or government-backed groups from more than 50 countries. These groups have many goals including intelligence collection, stealing intellectual property, targeting dissidents and activists, destructive cyber attacks, or spreading coordinated disinformation. We use the intelligence we gather to protect Google infrastructure as well as users targeted with malware or phishing.

Phishing

We’ve had a long-standing policy to send users warnings if we detect that they are the subject of state-sponsored phishing attempts, and have posted periodically about these before. From July to September 2019, we sent more than 12,000 warnings to users in 149 countries that they were targeted by government-backed attackers. This is consistent (+/-10%) with the number of warnings sent in the same period of 2018 and 2017.

govt backed phishing targets in q3 2019.png

Distribution of government-backed phishing targets in Q3 (Jul-Sep 2019)

Over 90 percent of these users were targeted via “credential phishing emails” similar to the example below. These are usually attempts to obtain the target’s password or other account credentials to hijack their account. We encourage high-risk users—like journalists, human rights activists, and political campaigns—to enroll in our Advanced Protection Program (APP), which utilizes hardware security keys and provides the strongest protections available against phishing and account hijackings. APP is designed specifically for the highest-risk accounts.

In the simple phishing example below, an attacker has sent a phishing email with a security alert lure from “Goolge” suggesting the user secure their account. The user clicks the link, enters their password, and may also get asked for a security code if they have two-factor authentication enabled, allowing the attacker to access their account.

sample gmail lure.png

Sample lure used to phish Gmail users

Threat detection

Last week at CyberwarCon, we presented analysis about previously undisclosed campaigns from a Russia-nexus threat group called “Sandworm” (also known as “Iridium”). It’s a useful example of the type of detailed threat detection work that TAG does. Although much of Sandworm’s activity targeting Ukraine and their attacks against the 2018 Winter Olympics have been covered publicly, some campaigns have not been reported. 

In December 2017, TAG discovered a series of campaigns from Sandworm attempting to deploy Android malware. The first campaign targeted users in South Korea, where Sandworm was modifying legitimate Android applications with malware. They then uploaded these modified apps to the Play Store using their own attacker-controlled developer accounts. During this campaign, Sandworm uploaded eight different apps to the Play Store, each with fewer than 10 total installs. 

malicious apps targeting users in south korea.png

Malicious apps targeting users in South Korea

We also identified an earlier September 2017 Android campaign from Sandworm where they used similar tactics and deployed a fake version of the UKR.net email app on the Play Store. This application had approximately 1,000 total installs. We worked with our colleagues on the Google Play Protect Team to write detections for this malware family, and eliminate it.

In November 2018, we saw evidence that Sandworm shifted from using attacker-controlled accounts to try and upload malicious apps to compromising legitimate developers. Throughout November, Sandworm targeted software and mobile app developers in Ukraine via spear phishing emails with malicious attachments. In at least one case, they compromised an app developer with several published Play Store apps—one with more than 200,000 installs. 

After compromising the developer, Sandworm built a backdoor in one of the legitimate apps and attempted to publish it on the Play Store. They did this by adding their implant code into the application package, signing the package with the compromised developer’s key, and then uploading it to the Play Store. However, the Google Play Protect team caught the attempt at the time of upload. As a result, no users were infected and we were able to re-secure the developer’s account.

Disinformation

TAG is one part of Google and YouTube’s broader efforts to tackle coordinated influence operations that attempt to game our services. We share relevant threat information on these campaigns with law enforcement and other tech companies. Here are some examples that have been reported recently that TAG worked on:

  • TAG recently took action against Russia-affiliated influence operations targeting several nations in Africa. The operations use inauthentic news outlets to disseminate messages promoting Russian interests in Africa. We have observed the use of local accounts and people to contribute to the operation, a tactic likely intended to make the content appear more genuine. Targeted countries included the Central African Republic, Sudan, Madagascar, and South Africa, and languages used included English, French, and Arabic. Activity on Google services was limited, but we enforced across our products swiftly. We terminated the associated Google accounts and 15 YouTube channels, and we continue to monitor this space. This discovery was consistent with recent observations and actions announced by Facebook. 

  • Consistent with a recent Bellingcat report, TAG identified a campaign targeting the Indonesian provinces Papua and West Papua with messaging in opposition to the Free Papua Movement. Google terminated one advertising account and 28 YouTube channels.

Partnerships

TAG works closely with other technology companies—including platforms and specialized security firms—to share intelligence and best practices. We also share threat information with law enforcement. And of course there are multiple teams at Google at work on these issues with whom we coordinate. 

Going forward, our goal is to give more updates on the attacks that TAG detects and stops. Our hope is that shining more light on these actors will be helpful to the security community, deter future attacks, and lead to better awareness and protections among high-risk targets.