Internet scammers move pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Just as Ferris Bueller always had another trick up his sleeve to dupe Principle Rooney, attackers are employing homoglyphs, subdomain attacks, typo-squats, bit-squats, and similar attacks to trick internet denizens with fraudulent websites.
Adversaries may register domains permutations in order to commit fraud, distribute malware, redirect traffic, steal credentials, or for corporate espionage. We know these threats have been around for a while, but not many defenders adopt proactive technical controls in their social engineering incident response plans. The question isn't what are we going to do about it.
The question is what aren't we going to do. With the capability to continuously monitor domain permutations for new HTTP, HTTPS, or SMTP services in real-time, the blue team doesn’t have to trust domain permutations any further than they can throw them. In this talk, we will demonstrate red team and blue team techniques. For Buellers, demonstrations include ways to leverage domain permutations in adversary simulations. For Rooneys, we will detail how to better prepare, identify, contain, and eradicate threats that utilize domain permutations. If you’re not leveraging our recommended technical controls to defeat attackers, you risk fishing for your wallet in a yard full of rage-fueled Rottweilers.
One special type of domain permutation is a bitflip. A bitflip squats are most dangerous to machines directly as compared to other domain permutations which can be used to prey on human mistakes (typo squats). It's a mistake in memory, disk, or on the wire, where interference, heat, radiation, or power flux causes a 0 to turn into a 1 or a 1 to turn into a 0. This has dire consequences on the routing of your packets if it happens to a FQDN value. Mike Brooks realized this can be taken to the next level by applying free TLS/SSL certificates to these domains and inadvertently receive encrypted traffic that wasn't meant for you. Oscar and I made some demos of how this can be used for opportunistic mass surveillance for a few thousand dollars. Specifically how bitflip squatting + TLS can be abused to intercept requests and inject JavaScript into browsers, steal Microsoft O365 passwords, and achieve RCE on computers trying to update software from third-party dependencies. Scariest part is this may be happening to your phone and you may not even realize it, a ghost 👻 in your browser: