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Phishers Use Wildcard DNS to Build Convincing Bait URLs |
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Andrew Robinson
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Monday, 07 March 2005 |
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Phishing operations have begun using DNS wildcards and URL encoding to create email links that display the URLs of legitimate banking sites, but send victims to spoof sites designed to steal their login details. A wildcard DNS record (*.example.com) will resolve all requests that are not matched by any other record. Wildcards are typically used to manage errant or mistyped e-mail addresses, but have been routinely abused by spammers. In recent weeks wildcard DNS settings have been used in a wave of phishing attacks on Barclays Bank, in which the "bait" email included URLs starting with barclays.co.uk, followed by a lengthy sequence of letters and symbols. Several examples: http://barclays.co.uk|snc9d8ynusktl2wpqxzn1anes89gi8z.dvdlinKs.at/pgcgc3p/
http://barclays.co.uk|YJ3EMOHOqljQ8J5oW2ZKyTaRMQOahSWaxTrFTEQK9l9VVQj6jDtyq10d24r2h0bijh2
http://barclays.co.uk|34fdcb4rvdnp9phxbahhvbs6l56a2uyx%2edivxmovies%2ea%74/41pvaw3/ The phishers use a wildcard DNS setting at a third-party redirection service (kickme.to) to construct the URLS. The wildcard allows the display of URLs beginning with "barclays.co.uk," which is followed by a portion of the URL which is encoded to obscure the actual destination domain. Full article, more information and fraud site screengrabs available at Netcraft.com
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