Technique T0149.003: Lookalike Domain

Summary: A Lookalike Domain is a Domain which is visually similar to another Domain, with the potential for web users to mistake one domain for the other.

Threat actors who want to impersonate organisations’ websites have been observed using a variety of domain impersonation methods. For example, actors wanting to create a domain impersonating netflix.com may use methods such as typosquatting (e.g. n3tflix.com), combosquatting (e.g. netflix-billing.com), or TLD swapping (e.g. netflix.top).
Belongs to tactic stage: TA15

Incident	Descriptions given for this incident
I00107 The Lies Russia Tells Itself	The Moscow firm Social Design Agency (SDA) has been attributed as being behind a Russian disinformation project known as Doppelganger: The SDA’s deception work first surfaced in 2022, likely almost immediately after Doppelganger got off the ground. In April of that year, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, disclosed in a quarterly report that it had removed from its platforms “a network of about 200 accounts operated from Russia.” By August 2022, German investigative journalists revealed that they had discovered forgeries of about 30 news sites, including many of the country’s biggest media outlets—Frankfurter Allgemeine, Der Spiegel, and Bild—but also Britain’s Daily Mail and France’s 20 Minutes. The sites had deceptive URLs such as www-dailymail-co-uk.dailymail.top. As part of the SDA’s work, they created many websites which impersonated existing media outlets. Sites used domain impersonation tactics to increase perceived legitimacy of their impersonations (T0097.202: News Outlet Persona, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona, T0152.003: Website Hosting Platform, T0149.003: Lookalike Domain).
I00126 Charming Kitten Updates POWERSTAR with an InterPlanetary Twist	The target of the recently observed [highly targeted spearphishing attack by “Charming Kitten”, a hacker group attributed to Iran] had published an article related to Iran. The publicity appears to have garnered the attention of Charming Kitten, who subsequently created an email address to impersonate a reporter of an Israeli media organization in order to send the target an email. Prior to sending malware to the target, the attacker simply asked if the target would be open to reviewing a document they had written related to US foreign policy. The target agreed to do so, since this was not an unusual request; they are frequently asked by journalists to review opinion pieces relating to their field of work. In an effort to further gain the target’s confidence, Charming Kitten continued the interaction with another benign email containing a list of questions, to which the target then responded with answers. After multiple days of benign and seemingly legitimate interaction, Charming Kitten finally sent a “draft report”; this was the first time anything opaquely malicious occurred. The “draft report” was, in fact, a password-protected RAR file containing a malicious LNK file. The password for the RAR file was provided in a subsequent email. In this example, threat actors created an email address on a domain which impersonated an existing Israeli news organisation impersonating a reporter who worked there (T0097.102: Journalist Persona, T0097.202: News Outlet Persona, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona, T0149.003: Lookalike Domain, T0149.002: Email Domain Asset) in order to convince the target to download a document containing malware (T0085.004: Develop Document, T0147.003: Malware Asset).

Incident

Descriptions given for this incident

I00107 The Lies Russia Tells Itself

The Moscow firm Social Design Agency (SDA) has been attributed as being behind a Russian disinformation project known as Doppelganger:

The SDA’s deception work first surfaced in 2022, likely almost immediately after Doppelganger got off the ground. In April of that year, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, disclosed in a quarterly report that it had removed from its platforms “a network of about 200 accounts operated from Russia.” By August 2022, German investigative journalists revealed that they had discovered forgeries of about 30 news sites, including many of the country’s biggest media outlets—Frankfurter Allgemeine, Der Spiegel, and Bild—but also Britain’s Daily Mail and France’s 20 Minutes. The sites had deceptive URLs such as www-dailymail-co-uk.dailymail.top.

As part of the SDA’s work, they created many websites which impersonated existing media outlets. Sites used domain impersonation tactics to increase perceived legitimacy of their impersonations (T0097.202: News Outlet Persona, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona, T0152.003: Website Hosting Platform, T0149.003: Lookalike Domain).

I00126 Charming Kitten Updates POWERSTAR with an InterPlanetary Twist

The target of the recently observed [highly targeted spearphishing attack by “Charming Kitten”, a hacker group attributed to Iran] had published an article related to Iran. The publicity appears to have garnered the attention of Charming Kitten, who subsequently created an email address to impersonate a reporter of an Israeli media organization in order to send the target an email. Prior to sending malware to the target, the attacker simply asked if the target would be open to reviewing a document they had written related to US foreign policy. The target agreed to do so, since this was not an unusual request; they are frequently asked by journalists to review opinion pieces relating to their field of work.

In an effort to further gain the target’s confidence, Charming Kitten continued the interaction with another benign email containing a list of questions, to which the target then responded with answers. After multiple days of benign and seemingly legitimate interaction, Charming Kitten finally sent a “draft report”; this was the first time anything opaquely malicious occurred. The “draft report” was, in fact, a password-protected RAR file containing a malicious LNK file. The password for the RAR file was provided in a subsequent email.

In this example, threat actors created an email address on a domain which impersonated an existing Israeli news organisation impersonating a reporter who worked there (T0097.102: Journalist Persona, T0097.202: News Outlet Persona, T0143.003: Impersonated Persona, T0149.003: Lookalike Domain, T0149.002: Email Domain Asset) in order to convince the target to download a document containing malware (T0085.004: Develop Document, T0147.003: Malware Asset).

Counters	Response types

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3.8 KiB Raw Blame History Unescape Escape

Technique T0149.003: Lookalike Domain

3.8 KiB

Raw Blame History