When we did annual pen testing audits for my last company, the security audit company always offered to do phishing or social engineering attacks, but advised against it because they said it worked every single time.
One of the most memorable things they shared is they'd throw USB sticks in the parking lot of the company they were pentesting and somebody would always put the thing into a workstation to see what as on it and get p0wned.
>they'd throw USB sticks in the parking lot of the company they were pentesting and somebody would always put the thing into a workstation to see what as on it and get p0wned.
One of my favorite quotes is from an unnamed architect of the plan in a 2012 article about Stuxnet/the cyber attacks on Iran's nuclear program:
"It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn't think much about the thumb drive in their hand."
I don't think we should be calling the users idiots when we failed to make our systems secure by design. If a simple act like plugging in a thumb drive by a well-meaning user undermines the security of an entire operation, then why do we allow such a thing to happen?
Our company does regular phishing attacks against our own team, which apparently gets us a noteworthy 90% ‘not-click’ rate (don’t quote me on numbers).
Never mind that that 10% is still 1500 people xD
It’s gone so far that they’re now sending them from our internal domains, so when the banner to warn me it was an external email wasn’t there, I also got got.
At a previous position, I had a rather strained relationship with the IT department - they were very slow to fill requests and maintained an extremely locked down windows server that we were supposed to develop for. It wasn't the worse environment, but the constant red tape was pretty frustrating.
I got got when they sent out a phishing test email disguised as a survey of user satisfaction with the IT department. Honestly I couldn't even be mad about it - it looked like all those other sketchy corporate surveys complete with a link to a domain similar to Qualtrics (I think it was one or two letters off).
TBH this is probably the best argument for actually conducting phishing pentests. It shuts up the technical users who think they're too smart to need the handrails and safety nets that the IT department set up for the rest of the average plebs who work there.
(Speaking as one of the technical users here. Of course, it wouldn't happen to ME! :P )
if you've got email filters set up that sort emails by (dkim-verified) sender into folders, phishing becomes immediate obvious as you start to wonder why it isn't sorted into the right folder.
My former company would send out rewards as a thank you to employees. It was basically a “click here to receive your free gift!” email. I kept telling the security team that this was a TERRIBLE president but it continued none the less. The first time I got one I didn’t open it for ages, even after confirming the company was real. It was only after like the 5th nagging email that I asked security about it and they confirmed that it was in fact a real thing the company was using. I got a roomba, a nice outdoor chair, and some sweet headphones. =)
There are SO MANY terrible practices like this carried out by companies big enough to know better. From registering new domains for email addresses (for a while a BigCorp customer of ours had a mix of @bigcorp.com and @bigcorp2.com email addresses, how the hell is any user meant to guess that MediumCorp hasn't also spun up a mediumcorp2.com mail server?!) to FedEx sending "click this link to pay import duties" texts from random unaffiliated (probably personal?) mobile numbers as their primary method of contacting recipients for import duties... The internet (like credit cards) is built on and around trust, and it shouldn't be.
Congrats on the loot, though! Your former company can't be all bad. ;)
I'm so surprised by this, not because I don't think that many people would fall for a phishing attempt, but because the corporate "training" phishing emails are so glaringly obvious that I think it does a disservice to the people being tested. I feel like it gives a false impression you can detect phishing via vibes when the real ones will be much stealthier.
Are your phishing emails good? If so if you don't mind name dropping the company so I can make a pitch to switch to them.
I had the opposite problem recently, I got a work phishing email from netflix.com . Now I still shouldn’t have clicked on it, netflix isn’t attached to my work email, but you couldn’t actually send a phishing email from account@netflix.com, they had to give access to our inboxes so the phishing company could manually drop it into our inboxes.
Like many other scams, an “obvious” entry point can be very useful as it makes victims self-selected, and a lot more likely to follow to completion. Even if the opportunity cost of phishing is low, having nobody report the attempt makes for a longer window of operation.
If you are getting powned by running random executables found on usb drives, passkeys aren’t going to save you. Same if the social engineering is going to get you to install random executables.
I think the claim is that plugging in the USB device is enough. If people needed to try running an executable from the device, some devices would still be compromised, but with lower frequency. I don't know exactly what happens. Automatically-triggered 'driver' install that is actually malware? Presenting as a keyboard and typing commands? Low-level cracks in the OS USB stack?
It feels to me more like OSes ought to be more secure. But USB devices are extremely convenient.
If you're getting pwned a physical Security Key still means bad guys don't have the actual credential (there's no way to get that), and they have to work relatively hard to even create a situation where maybe you to let them use the credential you do have (inside the Security Key) while they're in position to exploit you.
These devices want a physical interaction (this is called "User present") for most operations, typically signified by having a push button or contact sensor, so the attacker needs to have a proof of identity ready to sign, send that over - then persuade the user to push the button or whatever. It's not that difficult but it's one more step and if that doesn't work you wasted your shot.
All your 2FA apps, token, security keys, certificates and what not only protect the authentication (and in the case of online banking, a few other actions like transferring money). After that, a single bearer token authenticates each request. If your endpoint is compromised, the attackers will simply steal the bearer token after you authenticate.
That's true, but in terms of system design you definitely should ask to see the proof of identity again during unusual transactions and not just that bearer token - for example attempts to add or remove 2FA should need that extra step, as well as say high value financial transactions or irreversible system changes.
But, haven’t there been bugs where operating systems will auto run some executable as soon as the USB is plugged in? So, just to be paranoid, I’d classify just plugging the thing in as “running random executables.” At least as a non-security guy.
I wonder if anyone has tried going to a local staples or bestbuy something, and slipping the person at the register a bribe… “if anyone from so-and-so corp buys a flash drive here, put this one in their bag instead.”
Anyway, best to just put glue in the USB ports I guess.
Even if the OS doesn't have any bad security practices and doesn't do this, there is a very simple way to execute code from an USB stick: the USB stick pretends it's a USB keyboard and starts sending input to access a terminal. As long as the computer is unlocked, this will work, and will easily get full local user access, even defeating UAT or similar measures. It can then make itself persistent by "typing in" a malicious script, and going further from there.
> there is a very simple way to execute code from an USB stick: the USB stick pretends it's a USB keyboard and starts sending input to access a terminal
Good systems these days won't accept such a "keyboard" until it's approved by the user.
Which systems ask before allowing you to use a keyboard you just plugged in over USB? Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora certainly don't, at least not by default.
What I heard about the Stuxnet attack was different from what you are saying:
The enrichment facility had an air-gapped network, and just like our air-gapped networks, they had security requirements that mandated continuous anti-virus definition updates. The AV updates were brought in on a USB thumb drive that had been infected, because it WASN'T air-gapped when the updates were loaded. Obviously their AV tools didn't detect Stuxnet, because it was a state-sponsored, targeted attack, and not in the AV definition database.
So they were a victim of their own security policies, which were very effectively exploited.
A USB can pretend to be just about any type of device to get the appropriate driver installed and loaded. They can then send malformed packets to that driver to trigger some vulnerability and take over the system.
There are a _lot_ of drivers for devices on a default windows install. There are a _lot more_ if you allow for Windows Update to install drivers for devices (which it does by default). I would not trust all of them to be secure against a malicious device.
I know this is not how stuxxnet worked (instead using a vulnerability in how LNK files were shown in explorer.exe as the exploit), but that just goes to show how much surface there is to attack using this kind of USB stick.
And yeah, people still routinely plug random USBs in their computers. The average person is simultaneously curious and oblivious to this kind of threat (and I don't blame them - this kind of threat is hard to explain to a lay person).
Stuxnet deployment wasn't just a USB stick, though. It was a USB stick w/ a zero-day in the Windows shell for handling LNK files to get arbitrary code execution. That's not to say that random thumb drives being plugged-in by users is good, but Stuxnet deployment was a more sophisticated attack than just relying on the user to run a program.
Versions of it work necessarily. The gist is that the USB device presents as a keyboard and is pre-programmed to pop a shell and start blasting. No exploits required. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BadUSB.
Once a head of security worked for me (CTO), and she was great great great. She did the same, putting USB sticks on the printers for example and see who would plug one into their computer.
These audits are infuriating. At one company I was at it got so bad that I eventually stopped reading email and told people "If it's important, ping me on Slack"
I've seen someone do a live, on stage demo of phishing audit software, where they phished a real company, and showed what happens when someone falls for it.
Live. On stage. In minutes. People fall for it so reliably that you can do that.
When we ran it we got fake vouchers for "cost coffee" with a redeem link, new negative reviews of the company on "trustplot" with a reply link, and abnormal activity on your "whatapp" with a map of Russia, and a report link. They were exceptionally successful even despite the silly names.
Ever since I almost got phished (wasn't looking closely enough at the domain to notice a little stress mark over the "s" in the domain name, thankfully I was using a hardware wallet that prevented the attack entirely), I realized that anyone can get phished. They just rely on you being busy, or out, or tired, and just not checking closely enough.
Counterpoint: don't use passkeys, they're a confused mess and add limitations while not giving any benefits over a good long password in a password manager.
They prevent you from being one of these, and copy pasting the password from password manager into the wrong input field. Something that still happens often with many websites not properly auto-filling from password managers.
> They just rely on you being busy, or out, or tired, and just not checking closely enough
Password managers rarely are able to autofill 100% of the time. Autofill breaking is not a very strong indicator of a phishing attempt, people are used to manually filling the password in sometimes for totally legit sites.
I'm used to 1Password not being able to autofill, yes. But I'm not used to no account showing up at all when I open the UI panel. If that happens, I immediately know I'm on the wrong domain.
You know you're on a new domain. However, sites change their auth flow much more often than any patitcular person getting phished. So, if you're using a larger variety of site, you'll likely encounter the benign situation at least a dozen times before you ever encounter your first actual phishing attempt, at which point you'll have gotten used to it.
For example, Twitter relatively recently changed from authenticating on twitter.com to redirecting you to x.com to authenticate (interestingly, Firefox somehow still knows to auto fill my password, but not my username on the first page).
It's far too common for websites to redirect to some separate domain for sign in which isn't the one originally used to sign up, getting users used to "oh gotta copy the password again" as a totally normal thing that happens
I keep hearing people say this, but I haven’t found it so: in over a decade, I think I’ve only seen it twice. Looking through my password safe which I’ve been using for about twelve years with over 200 entries, I have nine cases with multiple origin URLs, and most of them I’m confident I added manually because I didn’t like the URL it recorded automatically (e.g. it’s on a different domain from the main site, and the specific path is for signup only, but I want to be able to “visit site” from the password safe and get to the login page or at least the homepage). I think that only two of them have ever actually used more than one origin: a banking one that switched from .com.au to .com at some point as part of a broader global restructuring (and they made a fair bit of noise about it, and you had to partly make a new account anyway), and a Microsoft account. There’s a third that I can’t check (COVID-related, gone) that might have been, but I don’t think so.
Now on a few occasions I’ve had to copy passwords in order to access things in a different browser, and I think I did encounter one site some years ago where autofill didn’t work, but I really do find autofill almost completely reliable.
So what happened exactly? Did Kurt enter his twitter password manually after clicking on that phishing link? Did he not get his sus detector going off after the password manager didn't suggest the password?
Unfortunately, this does not work. I see no end of banks, financial institutions, let alone random companies, who keep their authentication, for some reason, on different domain than main company, and sometimes they would have initial registration (which gets recorded in password manager) on one domain, and consequent logins on another, and sometimes it depends on how you arrived at the site, or which integration are you planning to use, etc. I wish there were a rule "one company - one auth domain" but it's just not true.
Example: Citi bank has citibankonline.com, citi.com, citidirect.com, citientertainment.com, etc. Would you be suspicious of a link to citibankdirect.com? Would you check the certificate for each link going there, and trace it down, or just assume Citi is up to their shenanigans again and paste the password manually? It's jungle out there.
> Would you check the certificate for each link going there, and trace it down, or just assume Citi is up to their shenanigans again and paste the password manually?
What do you get from checking a certificate? Oh yeah, must really be citibank because they have a shitton of SANs? I'd guess most banks do have a cert with an organization name, but organization names can be misleading, and some banks might use LetsEncrypt?
That happened to me as well, I put it down to "fucking password manager, it's broken again".
For example, BitWarden has spent the past month refusing to auto fill fields for me. Bugs are really not uncommon at all, I'd think my password manager is broken before I thought I'm getting phished (which is exactly how they get you).
For me it wasn't even a phone, it was on the desktop, I'm just so used to everything being buggy that it didn't trigger any alarms for me.
Luckily the only things I don't use passkeys or hardware keys for are things I don't care about, so I can't even remember what was phished. It goes to show, though, that that's what saved me, not the password manager, not my strong password, nothing.
Yes, PKC authentication is good, but the way passkeys have been implemented is not great. Way too much trust built into the protocol; way too much power granted to relying parties; much harder for users to form a correct mental model.
I mean the problem with Passkeys is that they're unsuitable as the sole login method for an account. They're great as a stronger "keep me logged in" for certain devices but they're something you have and they don't survive a fire. And so every service that offers Passkeys also has to offer a reset mechanism and a backup auth flow if you're on a device without the Passkey.
Any site that wants to phish you will either just not show the passkey flow and hope you forget or show it and make it look like it failed and pop up a helpful message about being able to register a new Passkey once you're logged in. And Passkeys are so finicky in browsers that I'd buy it.
Yep. A technical half-baked solution to a problem that has been solved since it's inception. Really just feels like FAANG exists to invent new ways to charge rent...
The part I found surprising: 'Twitter fell outside the “things we take seriously” boundary'
Sure Twitter is rubbish, but it's still a huge platform, still tied to your brand, you're still using it, so it can still hurt you. Either take it seriously or stop using it.
"Don't put your password into the website that you shouldn't and put it only to website that you should" is a circular advice.
It's like those 2FA SMS that say "don't tell this token to anyone!" while you literally share it with the website that you login to. I am always so frustrated when I receive those
This "content violation on your X post" phishing email is so common, we get about a dozen of those a week, and had to change the filters many times to catch them (because it's not easy to just detect the letter X and they keep changing the wording).
We also ended up dropping our email security provider because they consistently missed these. We evaluated/trialed almost a dozen different providers and finally found one that did detect every X phishing email! (Check Point fyi, not affiliated)
It was actually embarrassing for most of those security companies because the signs of phishing are very obvious if you look.
This is exactly how not to defend against phishing. The meaningful defense is to foreclose on it entirely, not to just get super good at spotting fakes.
So, in that case the browser (correctly) did not autofill? Is that a common occurrence for legit traffic from X? And no complaint about the website's identity from the browser -- the expected "lock" icon left of the URL?
As long as people are used to companies just buying new domains for the hell of it, yes. Just look at the amount of domains Microsoft uses for signing in! My password manager currently holds 8 of them. Eight! Who can be blamed for thinking it’s the password managers fault?
I was reading this and wondering why it was posted so high (I didn’t recognize the company name), and then I got to the name at the bottom. I think the lesson here is “if it could happen to Kurt, it could happen to anyone.” Yeah, the consequences here were pretty limited, but everyone’s got Some vulnerability, and it’s usually in the junk pile in the corner that you’re ignoring. If the attacker were genuinely trying to do damage (as opposed to just running a two-bit crypto scam), assuming the company’s official account is a fine start to leverage for some social engineering.
It genuinely took me a second - I was midway through writing a very different comment. Apparently reading comprehension is not on my skills list today…
This is why properly working password managers are important, and why as a web site operator you should make sure to not break them. My password not auto-filling on a web site is a sufficient red flag to immediately become very watchful.
Code-based 2FA, on the other hand, is completely useless against phishing. If I'm logging in, I'm logging in, and you're getting my 2FA code (regardless of whether it's coming from an SMS or an app).
And if you read the story, it's because he ignored the fact that the password manager didn't prompt auto-fill.
"I went to the link which is on mailchimp-sso.com and entered my credentials which - crucially - did not auto-complete from 1Password. I then entered the OTP and the page hung. Moments later, the penny dropped, and I logged onto the official website, which Mailchimp confirmed via a notification email which showed my London IP address:"
> the 1Password browser plugin would have noticed that “members-x.com” wasn’t an “x.com” host.
But shared accounts are tricky here, like the post says it's not part of their IdP / SSO and can't be, so it has to be something different. Yes, they can and should use Passkeys and/or 1password browser integration, but if you only have a few shared accounts, that difference makes for a different workflow regardless.
Yes; 1Password was used. And it worked properly. But because humans are fallible, a human made a mistake anyways.
"Properly working password managers" do not provide a strong defense against real world phishing attacks. The weak link of a phishing attack is human fallibility.
Precisely. 1Password's browser integration would have noticed a domain mismatch and refused to autofill the password -- but in a panic, Kurt apparently opened 1Password and then copied/pasted the credentials manually.
Correct. The moral of the story is that hardware MFA and/or passkeys are a necessity in today's world. An infinitely complex password and 2FA are no match for attacks that leverage human psychology.
This is how they got my Steam account credentials, although I realized the stupid shit I did the second I clicked submit form, and reset my password to random 32 characters using bitwarden. Me! Someone who is deeply technical AND paranoid.
The key here is the hacker must create the most incisive, scary email that will short circuit your higher brain functions and get you to log in.
I should have realized the fact that bitwarden did not autofill and take that as a sign.
Same thing happened to me (not with Steam), but it's also the thought that "this could never happen to me" that leads you to assign an almost zero probability to the problem being a phishing attempt.
Because CEOs at startups are notorious for trying to problem solve aggressively by "just" doing the thing rather than throwing it at a person who _might_ have made the same mistake, but might be more primed to be confused as to why they are not logged into x dot com and why 1password's password prompt doesn't show up and why the passkey doesn't work or whatever.
It's always possible to have issues, of course, and to make mistakes. But there's a risk profile to this kind of stuff that doesn't align well with how certain people work. Yet those same people will jump on these to fix it up!
I have been almost got, a couple of times. I'm not sure, but I may have realized that I got got, about 0.5 seconds after clicking[0], and was able to lock down, before they were able to grab it.
That's some impressive work on the attackers part having that whole fake landing page ready to go, and a pretty convincing phishing email.
I'm don't know much about crypto so I'm not sure what makes them call the scam 'not very plausible' and say it 'probably generated $0 for the attackers', is that something that can be verified by checking the wallet used in that fake landing page?
I want to say again that the key thing in this post is that anything "serious" at Fly.io couldn't have gotten phished: your SSO login won't work if you don't have mandatory phish-resistant 2FA set up for it. What went wrong here is that Twitter wasn't behind that perimeter, because, well, we have trouble taking Twitter seriously.
We shouldn't have, and we do take it seriously now.
I will say that a "Critical Security Vulnerability in flyctl, update now: https://bad-link/to/update.zip" tweet will have very serious consequences for a portion of your userbase, despite not directly compromising your own infra.
Twitter isn't an operational dependency of ours and we don't attest to it at all.
It also doesn't require we do that: what SOC2 actually demands of vendor security practices is much more complicated (and performative) than that. If Twitter were a real vendor dependency of ours, most of what we'd need would be a SOC2 attestation from them.
Given the CEO's responsibility for starving children to death through his political activities, there's an argument for not having any dependency at all on Twitter.
Is there an anti-phishing extension that detects whether the domain is close to, but not exactly the popular legitimate domain? Would probably need to use a local LLM for the detection. If not I might look into making one.
MetaMask (the crypto wallet) has one that shows warning pages to all domains that are remotely similar to crypto-related domains, and it is very prone to false positives and annoying. They have to maintain a list to skip the detection for real domains, and it's really inefficient.
Feels like this kind of detection is hard to balance, and calling legit websites possible phishing might be problematic...
Seems like the kind of problem LLMs would be perfect for. ChatGPT does a great job at giving a score of whether domains are attempting to appear legitimate, but of course no one wants their browsing history being sent off to OpenAI. Unfortunately from my testing local 4B-7B LLMs aren't up to the task.
Fly has consistently surprised me at how late they have been to doing the "standard company" stuff. Their sort of lack of support engineering teams for a while affected me way more though.
You gotta take the Legos away from the CEO! Being CEO means you stop doing the other stuff! Sorry!
And yes they have their silly disclaimer on their blog, but this is Yet Another "oh lol we made a whoopsie" tone that they've taken in the past several times for "real" issues. My favorite being "we did a thing, you should have read the forums where we posted about it, but clearly some of you didn't". You have my e-mail address!
Please.... please... get real comms. I'm tired of the "oh lol we're just doing shit" vibes from the only place I can _barely_ recommend as an alternative to Heroku. I don't need the cuteness. And 60% of that is because one of your main competitors has a totally unsearchable name.
I don't know where the official list of "standard company" stuff is, but I'd wager that for small to medium sized tech companies, it's relatively unsurprising for "leadership" to still be in the weeds on various operational projects and systems.
Don't know why this is getting downvoted. Agree with this so hard, as a continually aggrieved Fly customer (close to becoming an ex-customer). The too cool for school schtick gets old fast when they don't have the goods to back it up.
We've had an unusually large security team for the size of our company since 2021. I'm sorry if you don't like the way I communicate about it but I have no plans to change that. We take security extremely seriously. We just didn't take Twitter that seriously.
The "CEO" thing is just a running joke. Kurt's an engineer. Any of us could have been taken by this. I joke about this because I assume everybody gets the subtext, which is that anything you don't have behind phishing-resistant authentication is going to get phished. You apparently took it on the surface level, and believe I'm actually dunking on Kurt. No.
I'm not talking security, which I generally feel like is probably being done correctly.
I was thinking about, IIRC, back in 2023[0], where you all were suffering a lot of issues. And I _believe_ I saw some chatter about Fly building out a team of support/devops-y/SRE engineers around that time. And I had just assumed up until there that, as a company about operations, that you would already have a team that is about reliability.
I am not a major user of you (You're only selling me like 40 bucks a month of compute/storage/etc), but I had relatively often been hitting weird stuff. Some of it was me, some of it was your side. But... well... I was using Heroku for this stuff before and it seemed to run swimmingly for very long. So I was definitely a bit like "oh OK so you just didn't care about reliability until then?" I mean this lightly, but I started basically anti-recommending you after the combo of the issues and the statements your team was making (both on this kind of operations and also communications after the fact).
I think you all generally do this better now though, so maybe I'm just bringing up old grudges.
> You apparently took it on the surface level, and believe I'm actually dunking on Kurt.
No, I took it in the same tone I take a lot of your company's writing.
> The "CEO" thing is just a running joke. Kurt's an engineer.
I think if you are the CEO of a company above a certain (very low!) headcount you put down the Legos. There are enough "running a company" things to do. Maybe your dynamics are different, since your team is indeed quite small according to the teams page.
Every startup engineer has had to deal with "The CEO is the one with admin rights on this account and he's not doing the thing because somehow we haven't pried the credentials from him so that people doing the work does it". And then the dual of this, "The CEO fixes the thing at 2AM but does it the wrong way and now thing is weird". A way you avoid this is by yanking all credentials from the CEO.
I'm being glib here, because obviously y'all have your success, the Twitter thing "doesn't matter", etc. I just want to be able to recommend you fully, and the issues I hit + the amateur hour comms in response (EDIT: in the past) gets on my nerves and prevents me from doing it!
I'm always glad to see when companies, developers and CEOs make a heartfelt and humanistic mae culpa.
We would like to think that we're the smart ones and above such low level types of exploits, but the reality is that they can catch us at any moment on a good or bad day.
CEO here, I also almost got taken by a fake legal notice about a Facebook post. My password manager would not auto enter my password so I tried manually entering it like a dummy. Fortunately, it was the wrong one.
Isn’t turning off auto enter exacerbating the problem?
The avenue for catching this is that the password manager’s autofill won’t work on the phishing site, and the user could notice that and catch that it’s a malicious domain
Yes. This is the problem with the "just use a password manager" answer to phishing-resistance. They can be a line of defense, situationally, but you have to have them configured just right, and if you're using phishing-resistant authentication you don't need that line of defense in the first place.
Isn't this backwards? If the autocomplete doesn't show up that's a flag that the password is going somewhere it doesn't belong. If you're always copy-pasting from a password manager then you're not getting that check "for free".
Obviously SSO-y stuff is _better_, but autofill seems important for helping to prevent this kind of scam. Doesn't prevent everything of course!
None of this password manager configuration stuff matters; we've just got Passkeys set up for the account now, which is what we should have done, but didn't, because we spent the last 2 years with one foot out the door on Twitter altogether.
Since this attack happened despite Kurt using 1Password, I'm really not all that receptive to the idea that 1Password is a good answer to this problem.
Autofill doesn't always work for every site. So, now you're having to store in your mind where it works and where it doesn't. By disabling it, it forces you to go the extra step (command-shift-L) every time.
You're right. The point is that hotkey makes me think and observe more. Again, I don't have to remember if the site previous worked with autofill, or not.
It doesn't seem irrelevant to me at all. Security these days isn't just one action, it is a multitude of actions and steps and thought processes.
By removing the expectation that my password manager is going to autofill something, I'm now making the conscious decision to always try to fill it myself.
This makes me think more about what I'm doing, and prevents me from making nearly as many mistakes. I don't let my guard down to let the tools do all the work for me. I have to think: ok, I'll autofill things now, realize that it isn't working, and then look more closely at why it wasn't working as I expected.
I won't just blindly copy/paste my credentials into the site because whoops, I think it might have worked previously.
No, that's the opposite of the moral of that story. If the person you responded to had listened to the fact that the auto-enter didn't auto-enter, they wouldn't have been at any risk. Likewise in the article, the problem was that the CEO copy-pasted the password into the phishing page's password field, NOT that the auto-enter prompted him to do so.
As I mention below: Autofill doesn't always work for every site. So, now you're having to store in your mind where it works and where it doesn't. By disabling it, it forces you to go the extra step (command-shift-L) every time.
if anyone @ x.com infosec is here, my buddy got her account phished / there is someone in CS selling creds. Then it was used to pump a crypto scam and she has been trying for months to get it sorted. She's had the account for 16 plus years, it's surprising it's this hard to fix.
It's x.com/leighleighsf, we've tried every channel but for filing a small claims lawsuit in Texas to get her account back.
Like with occupational safety, we should worry about near misses as well as actual hacks. If you realize you just logged into X from a link in an email, you should berate yourself for could-have-been-hacked. Never enter credentials into links from emails!
... could we get webauthn / yubikeys prioritized for fly? afaik (don't want to disable 2fa to find out), it only supports totp.
For everyone reading though, you should try fly. Unaffiliated except for being a happy customer. 50 lines of toml is so so much better than 1k+ lines of cloudformation.
We don't like TOTP, at all, for reasons even more obvious now, but our standard answer for advanced MFA has been OIDC, which is what most people should do rather than setting up bespoke U2F/FIDO2/Passkeys.
> This is, in fact, how all of our infrastructure is secured at Fly.io; specifically, we get everything behind an IdP (in our case: Google’s) and have it require phishing-proof MFA.
Every system is only as secure as its weakest link. If the company's CEO is idiotic enough to pull credentials from 1Password and manually copy-past them on a random website whose domain does not match the service that issued it, what is to say they won't do the same for an MFA token?
They literally explain in the article they're using FIDO MFA that is phishing proof as the key authenticates the website (it's not your run-of-the-mill sms 2FA, it's using WebAuthn to talk to your MFA).
I think you'll be led astray thinking this is CEO-specific.
The whole theory of phishing, and especially targeted phishing, is to present a scenario that tricks the user into ignoring the red flags. Usually, this is an urgent call to action that something negative will happen, coupled with a tie-in to something that seems legit. In this case, it was referencing a real post that the company had made.
A parallel example is when parents get phone calls saying "hey it's your kid, I took a surprise trip to a tiny island nation and I've been kidnapped, I need you to wire $1000 immediately or they're going to kill me". That interaction is full of red flags, but the psychological hit is massive and people pay out all the time.
I razz CEOs in jest, but my point is: This is an example of a good phishing attempt? ChatGPT could surely find and fix most of the red flags I called out. Perhaps the red flags ensure they don't phish more people than they can productively exploit.
There are certainly phishing attempts that are pixel perfect, but I'd say way more energy tends to go into making phishing websites perfect. The goal of the email is to flip people into action as quickly as possible with as little validation.
When we did annual pen testing audits for my last company, the security audit company always offered to do phishing or social engineering attacks, but advised against it because they said it worked every single time.
One of the most memorable things they shared is they'd throw USB sticks in the parking lot of the company they were pentesting and somebody would always put the thing into a workstation to see what as on it and get p0wned.
Phishing isn't really that different.
Great reminder to setup Passkeys: https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-use-passk...
>they'd throw USB sticks in the parking lot of the company they were pentesting and somebody would always put the thing into a workstation to see what as on it and get p0wned.
One of my favorite quotes is from an unnamed architect of the plan in a 2012 article about Stuxnet/the cyber attacks on Iran's nuclear program:
"It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn't think much about the thumb drive in their hand."
I don't think we should be calling the users idiots when we failed to make our systems secure by design. If a simple act like plugging in a thumb drive by a well-meaning user undermines the security of an entire operation, then why do we allow such a thing to happen?
Relevant: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/10/security_desi...
Yes. People used to laugh at the auto-play for CD-ROMs in Windows 95. But if a USB device can hijack your system, is it that different?
Our company does regular phishing attacks against our own team, which apparently gets us a noteworthy 90% ‘not-click’ rate (don’t quote me on numbers).
Never mind that that 10% is still 1500 people xD
It’s gone so far that they’re now sending them from our internal domains, so when the banner to warn me it was an external email wasn’t there, I also got got.
At a previous position, I had a rather strained relationship with the IT department - they were very slow to fill requests and maintained an extremely locked down windows server that we were supposed to develop for. It wasn't the worse environment, but the constant red tape was pretty frustrating.
I got got when they sent out a phishing test email disguised as a survey of user satisfaction with the IT department. Honestly I couldn't even be mad about it - it looked like all those other sketchy corporate surveys complete with a link to a domain similar to Qualtrics (I think it was one or two letters off).
TBH this is probably the best argument for actually conducting phishing pentests. It shuts up the technical users who think they're too smart to need the handrails and safety nets that the IT department set up for the rest of the average plebs who work there.
(Speaking as one of the technical users here. Of course, it wouldn't happen to ME! :P )
if you've got email filters set up that sort emails by (dkim-verified) sender into folders, phishing becomes immediate obvious as you start to wonder why it isn't sorted into the right folder.
If you never read your emails, it's hard for them to get you with phishing emails.
My former company would send out rewards as a thank you to employees. It was basically a “click here to receive your free gift!” email. I kept telling the security team that this was a TERRIBLE president but it continued none the less. The first time I got one I didn’t open it for ages, even after confirming the company was real. It was only after like the 5th nagging email that I asked security about it and they confirmed that it was in fact a real thing the company was using. I got a roomba, a nice outdoor chair, and some sweet headphones. =)
I'm pretty sure you meant "terrible precedent" but I giggled a bit thinking "yeah the company president is pretty bad for forcing this".
I kinda want to start using "setting a terrible president" now and see who calls me out on it. :D
There are SO MANY terrible practices like this carried out by companies big enough to know better. From registering new domains for email addresses (for a while a BigCorp customer of ours had a mix of @bigcorp.com and @bigcorp2.com email addresses, how the hell is any user meant to guess that MediumCorp hasn't also spun up a mediumcorp2.com mail server?!) to FedEx sending "click this link to pay import duties" texts from random unaffiliated (probably personal?) mobile numbers as their primary method of contacting recipients for import duties... The internet (like credit cards) is built on and around trust, and it shouldn't be.
Congrats on the loot, though! Your former company can't be all bad. ;)
I'm so surprised by this, not because I don't think that many people would fall for a phishing attempt, but because the corporate "training" phishing emails are so glaringly obvious that I think it does a disservice to the people being tested. I feel like it gives a false impression you can detect phishing via vibes when the real ones will be much stealthier.
Are your phishing emails good? If so if you don't mind name dropping the company so I can make a pitch to switch to them.
I had the opposite problem recently, I got a work phishing email from netflix.com . Now I still shouldn’t have clicked on it, netflix isn’t attached to my work email, but you couldn’t actually send a phishing email from account@netflix.com, they had to give access to our inboxes so the phishing company could manually drop it into our inboxes.
Like many other scams, an “obvious” entry point can be very useful as it makes victims self-selected, and a lot more likely to follow to completion. Even if the opportunity cost of phishing is low, having nobody report the attempt makes for a longer window of operation.
If you are getting powned by running random executables found on usb drives, passkeys aren’t going to save you. Same if the social engineering is going to get you to install random executables.
I think the claim is that plugging in the USB device is enough. If people needed to try running an executable from the device, some devices would still be compromised, but with lower frequency. I don't know exactly what happens. Automatically-triggered 'driver' install that is actually malware? Presenting as a keyboard and typing commands? Low-level cracks in the OS USB stack?
It feels to me more like OSes ought to be more secure. But USB devices are extremely convenient.
If you're getting pwned a physical Security Key still means bad guys don't have the actual credential (there's no way to get that), and they have to work relatively hard to even create a situation where maybe you to let them use the credential you do have (inside the Security Key) while they're in position to exploit you.
These devices want a physical interaction (this is called "User present") for most operations, typically signified by having a push button or contact sensor, so the attacker needs to have a proof of identity ready to sign, send that over - then persuade the user to push the button or whatever. It's not that difficult but it's one more step and if that doesn't work you wasted your shot.
Malicious binary steals browser cookies giving attacker access to all active sessions?
It gets better. With malware on the box you own the primary refresh token, which can mint new browser tokens without needing passwords or MFA.
Definitely use FIDO2, but understand that it's not foolproof. Malware, OAuth phishing, XSS, DNS hijacking, etc. will still pwn you.
All your 2FA apps, token, security keys, certificates and what not only protect the authentication (and in the case of online banking, a few other actions like transferring money). After that, a single bearer token authenticates each request. If your endpoint is compromised, the attackers will simply steal the bearer token after you authenticate.
That's true, but in terms of system design you definitely should ask to see the proof of identity again during unusual transactions and not just that bearer token - for example attempts to add or remove 2FA should need that extra step, as well as say high value financial transactions or irreversible system changes.
Sure; the fix for that is blocking unexpected USB devices on corporate devices.
I don’t disagree.
But, haven’t there been bugs where operating systems will auto run some executable as soon as the USB is plugged in? So, just to be paranoid, I’d classify just plugging the thing in as “running random executables.” At least as a non-security guy.
I wonder if anyone has tried going to a local staples or bestbuy something, and slipping the person at the register a bribe… “if anyone from so-and-so corp buys a flash drive here, put this one in their bag instead.”
Anyway, best to just put glue in the USB ports I guess.
Even if the OS doesn't have any bad security practices and doesn't do this, there is a very simple way to execute code from an USB stick: the USB stick pretends it's a USB keyboard and starts sending input to access a terminal. As long as the computer is unlocked, this will work, and will easily get full local user access, even defeating UAT or similar measures. It can then make itself persistent by "typing in" a malicious script, and going further from there.
> there is a very simple way to execute code from an USB stick: the USB stick pretends it's a USB keyboard and starts sending input to access a terminal
Good systems these days won't accept such a "keyboard" until it's approved by the user.
Which systems ask before allowing you to use a keyboard you just plugged in over USB? Windows, Ubuntu, Fedora certainly don't, at least not by default.
Good luck doing hardware development without USB ports, as the IT team at my employer recently found out.
Second best option is to whitelist USB's PID and VID.
The stray USB stick is how Stuxnet allegedly got deployed. Tbh I doubt that works in this day and age.
What I heard about the Stuxnet attack was different from what you are saying:
The enrichment facility had an air-gapped network, and just like our air-gapped networks, they had security requirements that mandated continuous anti-virus definition updates. The AV updates were brought in on a USB thumb drive that had been infected, because it WASN'T air-gapped when the updates were loaded. Obviously their AV tools didn't detect Stuxnet, because it was a state-sponsored, targeted attack, and not in the AV definition database.
So they were a victim of their own security policies, which were very effectively exploited.
A USB can pretend to be just about any type of device to get the appropriate driver installed and loaded. They can then send malformed packets to that driver to trigger some vulnerability and take over the system.
There are a _lot_ of drivers for devices on a default windows install. There are a _lot more_ if you allow for Windows Update to install drivers for devices (which it does by default). I would not trust all of them to be secure against a malicious device.
I know this is not how stuxxnet worked (instead using a vulnerability in how LNK files were shown in explorer.exe as the exploit), but that just goes to show how much surface there is to attack using this kind of USB stick.
And yeah, people still routinely plug random USBs in their computers. The average person is simultaneously curious and oblivious to this kind of threat (and I don't blame them - this kind of threat is hard to explain to a lay person).
Stuxnet deployment wasn't just a USB stick, though. It was a USB stick w/ a zero-day in the Windows shell for handling LNK files to get arbitrary code execution. That's not to say that random thumb drives being plugged-in by users is good, but Stuxnet deployment was a more sophisticated attack than just relying on the user to run a program.
(They will run programs, though. They always do.)
Versions of it work necessarily. The gist is that the USB device presents as a keyboard and is pre-programmed to pop a shell and start blasting. No exploits required. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BadUSB.
It does work.
Hah, watch me.
Once a head of security worked for me (CTO), and she was great great great. She did the same, putting USB sticks on the printers for example and see who would plug one into their computer.
These audits are infuriating. At one company I was at it got so bad that I eventually stopped reading email and told people "If it's important, ping me on Slack"
I've seen someone do a live, on stage demo of phishing audit software, where they phished a real company, and showed what happens when someone falls for it.
Live. On stage. In minutes. People fall for it so reliably that you can do that.
When we ran it we got fake vouchers for "cost coffee" with a redeem link, new negative reviews of the company on "trustplot" with a reply link, and abnormal activity on your "whatapp" with a map of Russia, and a report link. They were exceptionally successful even despite the silly names.
Ever since I almost got phished (wasn't looking closely enough at the domain to notice a little stress mark over the "s" in the domain name, thankfully I was using a hardware wallet that prevented the attack entirely), I realized that anyone can get phished. They just rely on you being busy, or out, or tired, and just not checking closely enough.
Use passkeys for everything, like Thomas says.
If you grok Apple, I wrote up a tutorial on very basic PassKey implementation (for iOS apps), here: https://littlegreenviper.com/series/passkeys/
Very nice, thanks! By the way, the preferred capitalization is "passkeys", like "passwords". It's not supposed to be capitalized like a proper noun.
I prefer all lowercase. Not sure where I got the CamelCase version, but it may have been from the Apple or FIDO docs.
I’d like to write a follow-up that covers authentication apps/devices, but I need to do some research, and find free versions.
>I realized that anyone can get phished
A few years ago, I managed to get our InfoSec head phished (as a test). No one is safe :)
Counterpoint: don't use passkeys, they're a confused mess and add limitations while not giving any benefits over a good long password in a password manager.
They prevent you from being one of these, and copy pasting the password from password manager into the wrong input field. Something that still happens often with many websites not properly auto-filling from password managers.
> They just rely on you being busy, or out, or tired, and just not checking closely enough
If you are "copy-pasting" you are not using your password manager correctly.
Password managers rarely are able to autofill 100% of the time. Autofill breaking is not a very strong indicator of a phishing attempt, people are used to manually filling the password in sometimes for totally legit sites.
I'm used to 1Password not being able to autofill, yes. But I'm not used to no account showing up at all when I open the UI panel. If that happens, I immediately know I'm on the wrong domain.
You know you're on a new domain. However, sites change their auth flow much more often than any patitcular person getting phished. So, if you're using a larger variety of site, you'll likely encounter the benign situation at least a dozen times before you ever encounter your first actual phishing attempt, at which point you'll have gotten used to it.
For example, Twitter relatively recently changed from authenticating on twitter.com to redirecting you to x.com to authenticate (interestingly, Firefox somehow still knows to auto fill my password, but not my username on the first page).
It's far too common for websites to redirect to some separate domain for sign in which isn't the one originally used to sign up, getting users used to "oh gotta copy the password again" as a totally normal thing that happens
I keep hearing people say this, but I haven’t found it so: in over a decade, I think I’ve only seen it twice. Looking through my password safe which I’ve been using for about twelve years with over 200 entries, I have nine cases with multiple origin URLs, and most of them I’m confident I added manually because I didn’t like the URL it recorded automatically (e.g. it’s on a different domain from the main site, and the specific path is for signup only, but I want to be able to “visit site” from the password safe and get to the login page or at least the homepage). I think that only two of them have ever actually used more than one origin: a banking one that switched from .com.au to .com at some point as part of a broader global restructuring (and they made a fair bit of noise about it, and you had to partly make a new account anyway), and a Microsoft account. There’s a third that I can’t check (COVID-related, gone) that might have been, but I don’t think so.
Now on a few occasions I’ve had to copy passwords in order to access things in a different browser, and I think I did encounter one site some years ago where autofill didn’t work, but I really do find autofill almost completely reliable.
That should only happen once, you should store the password for the second domain too.
As I said in my comment above, sometimes it’s necessary as websites break the auto fill, or mobile apps don’t offer the password manager sheet.
This very story illustrates how people will override their password manager's builtin protections when panic ensues.
If only everyone did everything perfectly all the time, we wouldn't have any issues!
This whole story is about us getting zapped because we relied on a good long password in a password manager!
So what happened exactly? Did Kurt enter his twitter password manually after clicking on that phishing link? Did he not get his sus detector going off after the password manager didn't suggest the password?
Unfortunately, this does not work. I see no end of banks, financial institutions, let alone random companies, who keep their authentication, for some reason, on different domain than main company, and sometimes they would have initial registration (which gets recorded in password manager) on one domain, and consequent logins on another, and sometimes it depends on how you arrived at the site, or which integration are you planning to use, etc. I wish there were a rule "one company - one auth domain" but it's just not true.
Example: Citi bank has citibankonline.com, citi.com, citidirect.com, citientertainment.com, etc. Would you be suspicious of a link to citibankdirect.com? Would you check the certificate for each link going there, and trace it down, or just assume Citi is up to their shenanigans again and paste the password manually? It's jungle out there.
> Would you check the certificate for each link going there, and trace it down, or just assume Citi is up to their shenanigans again and paste the password manually?
What do you get from checking a certificate? Oh yeah, must really be citibank because they have a shitton of SANs? I'd guess most banks do have a cert with an organization name, but organization names can be misleading, and some banks might use LetsEncrypt?
That happened to me as well, I put it down to "fucking password manager, it's broken again".
For example, BitWarden has spent the past month refusing to auto fill fields for me. Bugs are really not uncommon at all, I'd think my password manager is broken before I thought I'm getting phished (which is exactly how they get you).
Yeah i could totally see how someone in a bind working off of phone could get p0wned like that
For me it wasn't even a phone, it was on the desktop, I'm just so used to everything being buggy that it didn't trigger any alarms for me.
Luckily the only things I don't use passkeys or hardware keys for are things I don't care about, so I can't even remember what was phished. It goes to show, though, that that's what saved me, not the password manager, not my strong password, nothing.
Yes, that's exactly what happened. The nature of panic is that it overrides people's better judgment.
Yes, PKC authentication is good, but the way passkeys have been implemented is not great. Way too much trust built into the protocol; way too much power granted to relying parties; much harder for users to form a correct mental model.
I mean the problem with Passkeys is that they're unsuitable as the sole login method for an account. They're great as a stronger "keep me logged in" for certain devices but they're something you have and they don't survive a fire. And so every service that offers Passkeys also has to offer a reset mechanism and a backup auth flow if you're on a device without the Passkey.
Any site that wants to phish you will either just not show the passkey flow and hope you forget or show it and make it look like it failed and pop up a helpful message about being able to register a new Passkey once you're logged in. And Passkeys are so finicky in browsers that I'd buy it.
Yep. A technical half-baked solution to a problem that has been solved since it's inception. Really just feels like FAANG exists to invent new ways to charge rent...
What’s the solution for preventing this kind of phishing attack?
The part I found surprising: 'Twitter fell outside the “things we take seriously” boundary'
Sure Twitter is rubbish, but it's still a huge platform, still tied to your brand, you're still using it, so it can still hurt you. Either take it seriously or stop using it.
Phishing training does not work.
"Understanding the Efficacy of Phishing Training in Practice" https://arianamirian.com/docs/ieee-25.pdf
"Don't put your password into the website that you shouldn't and put it only to website that you should" is a circular advice.
It's like those 2FA SMS that say "don't tell this token to anyone!" while you literally share it with the website that you login to. I am always so frustrated when I receive those
The same paper is linked in the original article.
Thanks. Stopped reading after I found out the article was not by the CEO.
> We are reliably informed by our zoomer children that we are too cringe to be trusted on these matters.
Bullseye. At least they take it with good humor.
This "content violation on your X post" phishing email is so common, we get about a dozen of those a week, and had to change the filters many times to catch them (because it's not easy to just detect the letter X and they keep changing the wording).
We also ended up dropping our email security provider because they consistently missed these. We evaluated/trialed almost a dozen different providers and finally found one that did detect every X phishing email! (Check Point fyi, not affiliated)
It was actually embarrassing for most of those security companies because the signs of phishing are very obvious if you look.
I got hit with the same kind of phishing attack a couple months ago
It's pretty incredible the level of UI engineering that went into it.
Some screenshots I took: https://x.com/grinich/status/1963744947053703309
I'm sorry but the imagecontent-x.com url should throw red flags for anyone.
This is exactly how not to defend against phishing. The meaningful defense is to foreclose on it entirely, not to just get super good at spotting fakes.
> The meaningful defense is to foreclose on it entirely
Sounds easy enough in theory. How do you do that in practice?
Use passkeys. Bully services that don’t offer them or lock them behind enterprise plans into implementing them.
That’s it. The single working Defense against credential theft.
So, in that case the browser (correctly) did not autofill? Is that a common occurrence for legit traffic from X? And no complaint about the website's identity from the browser -- the expected "lock" icon left of the URL?
As long as people are used to companies just buying new domains for the hell of it, yes. Just look at the amount of domains Microsoft uses for signing in! My password manager currently holds 8 of them. Eight! Who can be blamed for thinking it’s the password managers fault?
I was reading this and wondering why it was posted so high (I didn’t recognize the company name), and then I got to the name at the bottom. I think the lesson here is “if it could happen to Kurt, it could happen to anyone.” Yeah, the consequences here were pretty limited, but everyone’s got Some vulnerability, and it’s usually in the junk pile in the corner that you’re ignoring. If the attacker were genuinely trying to do damage (as opposed to just running a two-bit crypto scam), assuming the company’s official account is a fine start to leverage for some social engineering.
I think you mean Kurt.
It would help if they mentioned his name anywhere in the post, title, or subtitle.
Yeah, that was definitely a pebkac on my part.
It's ok, I just couldn't pass up a good opportunity for snark!
It genuinely took me a second - I was midway through writing a very different comment. Apparently reading comprehension is not on my skills list today…
You’re right - I flagged on Thomas’s name in the signature and because I’ve seen him around here, well, forever, but Kurt is also extremely savvy.
No he's not! He got taken by this dumb phishing thing!
This is why properly working password managers are important, and why as a web site operator you should make sure to not break them. My password not auto-filling on a web site is a sufficient red flag to immediately become very watchful.
Code-based 2FA, on the other hand, is completely useless against phishing. If I'm logging in, I'm logging in, and you're getting my 2FA code (regardless of whether it's coming from an SMS or an app).
the creator of https://haveibeenpwned.com got phished once (no kidding), and he uses a password manager.
And if you read the story, it's because he ignored the fact that the password manager didn't prompt auto-fill.
"I went to the link which is on mailchimp-sso.com and entered my credentials which - crucially - did not auto-complete from 1Password. I then entered the OTP and the page hung. Moments later, the penny dropped, and I logged onto the official website, which Mailchimp confirmed via a notification email which showed my London IP address:"
How does this square with the fact that the tech savvy person in the post was phished despite using a password manager.
The post calls this out:
> the 1Password browser plugin would have noticed that “members-x.com” wasn’t an “x.com” host.
But shared accounts are tricky here, like the post says it's not part of their IdP / SSO and can't be, so it has to be something different. Yes, they can and should use Passkeys and/or 1password browser integration, but if you only have a few shared accounts, that difference makes for a different workflow regardless.
Yes; 1Password was used. And it worked properly. But because humans are fallible, a human made a mistake anyways.
"Properly working password managers" do not provide a strong defense against real world phishing attacks. The weak link of a phishing attack is human fallibility.
Precisely. 1Password's browser integration would have noticed a domain mismatch and refused to autofill the password -- but in a panic, Kurt apparently opened 1Password and then copied/pasted the credentials manually.
Which is why a properly working password manager is not a strong defense against phishing.
Not a strong defense, but it helps.
But it's also why sites that don't work well with a password manager are actively setting their users up to be phished.
Same with every site that uses sketchy domains, or worse redirects you to xyz.auth0.com to sign in.
Correct. The moral of the story is that hardware MFA and/or passkeys are a necessity in today's world. An infinitely complex password and 2FA are no match for attacks that leverage human psychology.
It's a strong defense that this guy decided not to use
User security that doesn’t meet real users where they are is just nerd theatre.
It works for me. I’m unconcerned if it works for anybody else.
It works for lots of people, until it doesn't. You may well fall victim to such a scheme someday.
That’s almost guaranteed now that I made such a confident statement that it works for me.
This is how they got my Steam account credentials, although I realized the stupid shit I did the second I clicked submit form, and reset my password to random 32 characters using bitwarden. Me! Someone who is deeply technical AND paranoid.
The key here is the hacker must create the most incisive, scary email that will short circuit your higher brain functions and get you to log in.
I should have realized the fact that bitwarden did not autofill and take that as a sign.
Same thing happened to me (not with Steam), but it's also the thought that "this could never happen to me" that leads you to assign an almost zero probability to the problem being a phishing attempt.
Because CEOs at startups are notorious for trying to problem solve aggressively by "just" doing the thing rather than throwing it at a person who _might_ have made the same mistake, but might be more primed to be confused as to why they are not logged into x dot com and why 1password's password prompt doesn't show up and why the passkey doesn't work or whatever.
It's always possible to have issues, of course, and to make mistakes. But there's a risk profile to this kind of stuff that doesn't align well with how certain people work. Yet those same people will jump on these to fix it up!
It’s a bold move to typecast all CEOs as uniquely vulnerable to a problem that the evidence shows every single one of us is vulnerable to.
Blaming some attribute about user as why they fell for a phishing attempt is categorically misguided.
Turn off autofill, it is exploited by modern attacks including tapjacking
Great writeup, but also gotta say that’s some excellent phishing
This exact phish has been going around lately and we're not the only ones who got bit. But we didn't know that before it happened.
I enjoyed the self-deprecating humor behind it.
I have been almost got, a couple of times. I'm not sure, but I may have realized that I got got, about 0.5 seconds after clicking[0], and was able to lock down, before they were able to grab it.
[0] https://imgur.com/EfQrdWY
That's some impressive work on the attackers part having that whole fake landing page ready to go, and a pretty convincing phishing email.
I'm don't know much about crypto so I'm not sure what makes them call the scam 'not very plausible' and say it 'probably generated $0 for the attackers', is that something that can be verified by checking the wallet used in that fake landing page?
Funny!
Now that Kurt doesn't have commit access, who do I ask to get internal Fly Slack bot fizz off of my behind.
I was in a devrel channel for a short while and ever since it has asked me to write updates in a channel I don't have access to. Frequently.
I want to say again that the key thing in this post is that anything "serious" at Fly.io couldn't have gotten phished: your SSO login won't work if you don't have mandatory phish-resistant 2FA set up for it. What went wrong here is that Twitter wasn't behind that perimeter, because, well, we have trouble taking Twitter seriously.
We shouldn't have, and we do take it seriously now.
I will say that a "Critical Security Vulnerability in flyctl, update now: https://bad-link/to/update.zip" tweet will have very serious consequences for a portion of your userbase, despite not directly compromising your own infra.
[deleted]
Twitter isn't an operational dependency of ours and we don't attest to it at all. It also doesn't require we do that: what SOC2 actually demands of vendor security practices is much more complicated (and performative) than that. If Twitter were a real vendor dependency of ours, most of what we'd need would be a SOC2 attestation from them.
Given the CEO's responsibility for starving children to death through his political activities, there's an argument for not having any dependency at all on Twitter.
https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-usaid-thailand-trump-rubi...
Is there an anti-phishing extension that detects whether the domain is close to, but not exactly the popular legitimate domain? Would probably need to use a local LLM for the detection. If not I might look into making one.
MetaMask (the crypto wallet) has one that shows warning pages to all domains that are remotely similar to crypto-related domains, and it is very prone to false positives and annoying. They have to maintain a list to skip the detection for real domains, and it's really inefficient.
Feels like this kind of detection is hard to balance, and calling legit websites possible phishing might be problematic...
Seems like the kind of problem LLMs would be perfect for. ChatGPT does a great job at giving a score of whether domains are attempting to appear legitimate, but of course no one wants their browsing history being sent off to OpenAI. Unfortunately from my testing local 4B-7B LLMs aren't up to the task.
Edge has some basic typo squat protection
Fly has consistently surprised me at how late they have been to doing the "standard company" stuff. Their sort of lack of support engineering teams for a while affected me way more though.
You gotta take the Legos away from the CEO! Being CEO means you stop doing the other stuff! Sorry!
And yes they have their silly disclaimer on their blog, but this is Yet Another "oh lol we made a whoopsie" tone that they've taken in the past several times for "real" issues. My favorite being "we did a thing, you should have read the forums where we posted about it, but clearly some of you didn't". You have my e-mail address!
Please.... please... get real comms. I'm tired of the "oh lol we're just doing shit" vibes from the only place I can _barely_ recommend as an alternative to Heroku. I don't need the cuteness. And 60% of that is because one of your main competitors has a totally unsearchable name.
Still using fly, just annoyed.
I don't know where the official list of "standard company" stuff is, but I'd wager that for small to medium sized tech companies, it's relatively unsurprising for "leadership" to still be in the weeds on various operational projects and systems.
Don't know why this is getting downvoted. Agree with this so hard, as a continually aggrieved Fly customer (close to becoming an ex-customer). The too cool for school schtick gets old fast when they don't have the goods to back it up.
We've had an unusually large security team for the size of our company since 2021. I'm sorry if you don't like the way I communicate about it but I have no plans to change that. We take security extremely seriously. We just didn't take Twitter that seriously.
The "CEO" thing is just a running joke. Kurt's an engineer. Any of us could have been taken by this. I joke about this because I assume everybody gets the subtext, which is that anything you don't have behind phishing-resistant authentication is going to get phished. You apparently took it on the surface level, and believe I'm actually dunking on Kurt. No.
I'm not talking security, which I generally feel like is probably being done correctly.
I was thinking about, IIRC, back in 2023[0], where you all were suffering a lot of issues. And I _believe_ I saw some chatter about Fly building out a team of support/devops-y/SRE engineers around that time. And I had just assumed up until there that, as a company about operations, that you would already have a team that is about reliability.
I am not a major user of you (You're only selling me like 40 bucks a month of compute/storage/etc), but I had relatively often been hitting weird stuff. Some of it was me, some of it was your side. But... well... I was using Heroku for this stuff before and it seemed to run swimmingly for very long. So I was definitely a bit like "oh OK so you just didn't care about reliability until then?" I mean this lightly, but I started basically anti-recommending you after the combo of the issues and the statements your team was making (both on this kind of operations and also communications after the fact).
I think you all generally do this better now though, so maybe I'm just bringing up old grudges.
> You apparently took it on the surface level, and believe I'm actually dunking on Kurt.
No, I took it in the same tone I take a lot of your company's writing.
> The "CEO" thing is just a running joke. Kurt's an engineer.
I think if you are the CEO of a company above a certain (very low!) headcount you put down the Legos. There are enough "running a company" things to do. Maybe your dynamics are different, since your team is indeed quite small according to the teams page.
Every startup engineer has had to deal with "The CEO is the one with admin rights on this account and he's not doing the thing because somehow we haven't pried the credentials from him so that people doing the work does it". And then the dual of this, "The CEO fixes the thing at 2AM but does it the wrong way and now thing is weird". A way you avoid this is by yanking all credentials from the CEO.
I'm being glib here, because obviously y'all have your success, the Twitter thing "doesn't matter", etc. I just want to be able to recommend you fully, and the issues I hit + the amateur hour comms in response (EDIT: in the past) gets on my nerves and prevents me from doing it!
Anyways, I want you all to succeed.
[0]: https://community.fly.io/t/reliability-its-not-great/11253
I'm always glad to see when companies, developers and CEOs make a heartfelt and humanistic mae culpa.
We would like to think that we're the smart ones and above such low level types of exploits, but the reality is that they can catch us at any moment on a good or bad day.
Good write up
>heartfelt and humanistic mae culpa
They literally admit they pay a Zoomer to make memes for Twitter. I think you are falling for the PR.
Running sector-based boundary-to-boundary protocols, which extricate 1Password SSO's. $Fly Airdrop vulnerabilities stem as a .log >> test.txt
X Terms of Service error: Meme not dank enough.
CEO here, I also almost got taken by a fake legal notice about a Facebook post. My password manager would not auto enter my password so I tried manually entering it like a dummy. Fortunately, it was the wrong one.
This is exactly why I turned off auto enter.
Isn’t turning off auto enter exacerbating the problem?
The avenue for catching this is that the password manager’s autofill won’t work on the phishing site, and the user could notice that and catch that it’s a malicious domain
Yes. This is the problem with the "just use a password manager" answer to phishing-resistance. They can be a line of defense, situationally, but you have to have them configured just right, and if you're using phishing-resistant authentication you don't need that line of defense in the first place.
Isn't this backwards? If the autocomplete doesn't show up that's a flag that the password is going somewhere it doesn't belong. If you're always copy-pasting from a password manager then you're not getting that check "for free".
Obviously SSO-y stuff is _better_, but autofill seems important for helping to prevent this kind of scam. Doesn't prevent everything of course!
None of this password manager configuration stuff matters; we've just got Passkeys set up for the account now, which is what we should have done, but didn't, because we spent the last 2 years with one foot out the door on Twitter altogether.
Since this attack happened despite Kurt using 1Password, I'm really not all that receptive to the idea that 1Password is a good answer to this problem.
I guess I'm just saying "1Password with autofill" will help more than "1Password without autofill".
We can always make mistakes of course. And yeah, sometimes we just haven't done something.
I'm saying: an intervention was required here, and that intervention was not changing how we use auto-fill. Doing that would be playing to lose.
Makes sense, think we might have been talking past ourselves. Agreed on what you all actually did being right.
Autofill doesn't always work for every site. So, now you're having to store in your mind where it works and where it doesn't. By disabling it, it forces you to go the extra step (command-shift-L) every time.
Autofill and the hotkey use the same mechanism, and neither is going to work on a phishing site.
You're right. The point is that hotkey makes me think and observe more. Again, I don't have to remember if the site previous worked with autofill, or not.
Sure. Except this is a story about the user manually copying the credential into a phishing site after the password manager didn’t fill it in.
Whether that’s via a hotkey or not seems totally irrelevant.
It doesn't seem irrelevant to me at all. Security these days isn't just one action, it is a multitude of actions and steps and thought processes.
By removing the expectation that my password manager is going to autofill something, I'm now making the conscious decision to always try to fill it myself.
This makes me think more about what I'm doing, and prevents me from making nearly as many mistakes. I don't let my guard down to let the tools do all the work for me. I have to think: ok, I'll autofill things now, realize that it isn't working, and then look more closely at why it wasn't working as I expected.
I won't just blindly copy/paste my credentials into the site because whoops, I think it might have worked previously.
No, that's the opposite of the moral of that story. If the person you responded to had listened to the fact that the auto-enter didn't auto-enter, they wouldn't have been at any risk. Likewise in the article, the problem was that the CEO copy-pasted the password into the phishing page's password field, NOT that the auto-enter prompted him to do so.
As I mention below: Autofill doesn't always work for every site. So, now you're having to store in your mind where it works and where it doesn't. By disabling it, it forces you to go the extra step (command-shift-L) every time.
Hide Sidebar?
Honestly it sounds like you are missing the point while simultaneously using a bad password manager.
if anyone @ x.com infosec is here, my buddy got her account phished / there is someone in CS selling creds. Then it was used to pump a crypto scam and she has been trying for months to get it sorted. She's had the account for 16 plus years, it's surprising it's this hard to fix.
It's x.com/leighleighsf, we've tried every channel but for filing a small claims lawsuit in Texas to get her account back.
Like with occupational safety, we should worry about near misses as well as actual hacks. If you realize you just logged into X from a link in an email, you should berate yourself for could-have-been-hacked. Never enter credentials into links from emails!
That was beautiful to read. lol.
Dank post mortem ?
... could we get webauthn / yubikeys prioritized for fly? afaik (don't want to disable 2fa to find out), it only supports totp.
For everyone reading though, you should try fly. Unaffiliated except for being a happy customer. 50 lines of toml is so so much better than 1k+ lines of cloudformation.
We don't like TOTP, at all, for reasons even more obvious now, but our standard answer for advanced MFA has been OIDC, which is what most people should do rather than setting up bespoke U2F/FIDO2/Passkeys.
We will get to this though.
https://fly.io/blog/tokenized-tokens/
[Deleted]
[flagged]
We've banned this account.
When did fly.io create their own crypto?
They didn't...?
The first line of this article is talking about the $FLY token
I think it's a security token: https://fly.io/blog/macaroons-escalated-quickly/
And calling it $FLY like a crypto thing is part of the joke.
> But if we’d actually done an ICO, you’d have lost all your money anyways.
tru tru
> This is, in fact, how all of our infrastructure is secured at Fly.io; specifically, we get everything behind an IdP (in our case: Google’s) and have it require phishing-proof MFA.
Every system is only as secure as its weakest link. If the company's CEO is idiotic enough to pull credentials from 1Password and manually copy-past them on a random website whose domain does not match the service that issued it, what is to say they won't do the same for an MFA token?
They literally explain in the article they're using FIDO MFA that is phishing proof as the key authenticates the website (it's not your run-of-the-mill sms 2FA, it's using WebAuthn to talk to your MFA).
With this setup, you can't fuck up.
FIDO2 won’t send an authentication to a fake site, no matter what the human does.
That’s what makes it phishing-resistant.
The. whole. point. of. phishing-resistant. MFA. is. that. you. can't. do. the. same. thing.
I don't know the gullibility of the average tech CEO but this doesn't strike me as a very convincing phishing attempt.
* "We've received reports about the latest content" - weird copy
* "which doesn't meet X Terms of Service" - bad grammar lol
* "Important:Simply ..." - no spacing lol
* "Simply removing the content from your page doesn't help your case" - weird tone
* "We've opened a support portal for you " - weird copy
There should so many red flags here if you're a native english speaker.
There are some UX red flags as well, but I admit those are much less noticeable.
* Weird and inconsistent font size/weight
* Massive border radius on the twitter card image (lol)
* Gap sizes are weird/small
* Weird CTA
I think you'll be led astray thinking this is CEO-specific.
The whole theory of phishing, and especially targeted phishing, is to present a scenario that tricks the user into ignoring the red flags. Usually, this is an urgent call to action that something negative will happen, coupled with a tie-in to something that seems legit. In this case, it was referencing a real post that the company had made.
A parallel example is when parents get phone calls saying "hey it's your kid, I took a surprise trip to a tiny island nation and I've been kidnapped, I need you to wire $1000 immediately or they're going to kill me". That interaction is full of red flags, but the psychological hit is massive and people pay out all the time.
I razz CEOs in jest, but my point is: This is an example of a good phishing attempt? ChatGPT could surely find and fix most of the red flags I called out. Perhaps the red flags ensure they don't phish more people than they can productively exploit.
There are certainly phishing attempts that are pixel perfect, but I'd say way more energy tends to go into making phishing websites perfect. The goal of the email is to flip people into action as quickly as possible with as little validation.