I read an article about ransomware affecting the public transportation service in Kansas, and I wanted to ask how this can happen. Wikipedia says these are “are typically carried out using a Trojan, entering a system through, for example, a malicious attachment, embedded link in a phishing email, or a vulnerability in a network service,” but how? Wouldn’t someone still have to deliberately click a malicious link to install it? Wouldn’t anyone working for such an agency be educated enough about these threats not to do so?
I wanted to ask in that community, but I was afraid this is such a basic question that I felt foolish posting it there. Does anyone know the exact process by which this typically can happen? I’ve seen how scammers can do this to individuals with low tech literacy by watching Kitboga, but what about these big agencies?
Edit: After reading some of the responses, it’s made me realize why IT often wants to heavily restrict what you can do on a work PC, which is frustrating from an end user perspective, but if people are just clicking links in emails and not following basic internet safety, then damn.
An advanced phishing attack can be incredibly hard to detect. Here’s an example of a browser vulnerability that allowed malicious sites to spoof legitimate looking domains. It’s been fixed since then, but it’s a constant battle between fixing exploits and new ones being found. A sophisticated operator can come up with ways to trick even the most tech savvy user, and most users will fall for more obvious tricks than that.
There’s a new similar phishing attack thanks to Google and their .zip domain. Web browsers support a feature that lets you use addresses of the form
protocol://username:password@domain.tld. That feature allows you to log in todomain.tldwith the given credentials. When you combine that with Unicode forward slashes, you can craft addresses that look likehttps://microsoft.com/files/@windowsupdate.zip, where the part betweenhttps://and@is a username and the part after@is the actual address most likely used for malicious intends. My example uses normal slashes, so will lead to Microsoft’s website and page not found error.windowsupdate.zipis a domain someone has registered, but leads to no-where as of today. PSA: Don’t go to random web addresses you find on the Internet or elsewhere.Oh yes, the Latin vs. Cyrillic characters trick! Now that you mention it, I remember watching a YouTube video about this. Scary shit.
Homoglyph attacks!
How is this shit not fixed yet? That’s literally undetectable phishing
It is fixed, if you follow one of their example links you should see a warning now. I was using it as an example of how there can be hard to detect exploits.
EDIT: it’s fixed in Chrome. Just tried Firefox and they don’t have a warning 😕