A U.S. Supreme Court phishing campaign has been detected that uses a fake subpoena to appear in court as a lure to obtain Office 365 credentials. The emails are personalized and are addressed to the victim and claim to be a writ issued by the Supreme Court demanding the recipient attend a hearing. This is a targeted campaign rather than a spray and pray attack that attempts to obtain the credentials of high value targets such as C-Suite members.

The emails include a link that the recipient is required to click to view the subpoena. Clicking the link in the email directs the user to a malicious website where they are required to enter their Office 365 credentials to view the subpoena.

The domain used is brand new and, as such, it is not recognized as malicious by many security solutions, including the default anti-phishing measures of Office 365. The scammers have also used multiple redirects to hide the destination URL in another attempt to thwart anti-phishing defenses.

Prior to the user being directed to the phishing page, they are presented with a CAPTCHA page. CAPTCHA is used to prevent web visits by bots, but in this case, it may be used to add legitimacy to the phish to make the request appear genuine. The CAPTCHA page is real, and the user must correctly select the images in order to proceed. The page also includes the name of the user, further adding legitimacy to the scam. The CAPTCHA may also be a further attempt to make it difficult for the destination URL to be analyzed by security solutions.

This phishing campaign is realistic and uses urgency to get the user to take action quickly, rather than stopping to think about the request. There are signs that this is a scam, such as the domain name which clearly has nothing to do with the U.S. Supreme Court, and a few grammatical and spelling mistakes which would not be expected of any Supreme Court request.

However, the sender name in the email was spoofed to make it appear to have been sent by the “Supreme Court”, the request is certain to scare some recipients into clicking the link, and the landing page is sufficiently realistic to fool busy employees into disclosing their login credentials.

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Exchange Online protection (EOP), which is provided by Microsoft free of charge with all Office 365 accounts, often fails to spot these zero-day attacks.

To improve protection against new phishing campaigns, an anti-spam solution is required that incorporates predictive techniques, threat intelligence feeds, and machine learning algorithms. SpamTitan incorporates these and several other layers of protection to identify zero-day phishing, malware, and ransomware campaigns and email impersonation attacks.

SpamTitan can be layered on top of Microsoft’s Exchange Online Protection to serve as an additional layer to your email security defenses to ensure that more malicious emails are blocked and never reach end users inboxes.