Fraudulent Websites
Fraudulent websites are deceptive online platforms designed to mislead users and extract sensitive information or money through dishonest tactics. These sites often misrepresent themselves to appear legitimate but engage in illegal or unethical activities.
Here's a breakdown of their characteristics:
Deception: Fraudulent websites employ various deceptive techniques to trick users. This can include mimicking the appearance of trusted websites, providing false information, or making misleading claims.
Malicious Intent: The core purpose of fraudulent websites is to defraud users. This can involve stealing credentials, financial information, personal data, or tricking users into paying for non-existent goods or services.
Varied Forms: Fraudulent websites can take many forms, including fake online stores, phishing sites, investment scams, and other schemes designed to exploit users.
Cybersecurity Threat: Fraudulent websites pose a significant cybersecurity threat, leading to financial loss, identity theft, and other harmful consequences for individuals and organizations.
Here’s how ThreatNG can help in addressing the problem of fraudulent websites:
ThreatNG's external discovery capability is the foundation. It enables the platform to map an organization's online presence without requiring internal connections. This is crucial for identifying any web assets that fraudulent websites could exploit or impersonate.
ThreatNG's external assessment features are valuable in evaluating the risks associated with fraudulent websites:
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: ThreatNG analyzes the externally accessible parts of web applications to identify potential entry points for attackers. This is important because attackers might hijack parts of a legitimate web application to redirect users to a fraudulent site or to inject fraudulent elements.
Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: ThreatNG assesses a website's susceptibility to subdomain takeovers by analyzing subdomains, DNS records, and SSL certificate statuses. Attackers sometimes use compromised subdomains to host fraudulent websites, making this assessment essential.
BEC & Phishing Susceptibility: ThreatNG derives this from a combination of factors, including Domain Intelligence (with DNS Intelligence, Domain Name Permutations, and Web3 Domains capabilities) and Sentiment and Financials Findings. This assessment is highly relevant because fraudulent websites are often employed in phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks. For example, ThreatNG's Domain Name Permutations capability can reveal if attackers have registered slightly altered domain names to deceive users.
Brand Damage Susceptibility: ThreatNG uses attack surface intelligence, digital risk intelligence, ESG Violations, Sentiment and Financials, and Domain Intelligence (including Domain Name Permutations and Web3 Domains). Fraudulent websites can severely damage an organization's brand reputation, and ThreatNG's assessment helps understand and mitigate this risk.
Cyber Risk Exposure: ThreatNG considers parameters from its Domain Intelligence module, such as certificates, subdomain headers, vulnerabilities, and sensitive ports, to determine cyber risk exposure. This helps identify potential weaknesses attackers could exploit to create convincing fraudulent websites.
3. Reporting
ThreatNG provides various reports, including security ratings reports. These reports can highlight the risks associated with fraudulent websites.
ThreatNG's continuous monitoring of the external attack surface and digital risk is vital for the timely detection of fraudulent websites or related malicious activity.
ThreatNG's Investigation Modules provide detailed analysis capabilities:
Domain Record Analysis: ThreatNG analyzes domain records, including IP and vendor/technology identification. This can help in tracing the origin and infrastructure of a fraudulent website.
Domain Name Permutations: ThreatNG identifies taken and available domain name permutations. This is valuable for detecting typosquatting domains often used in fraudulent website attacks. For example, if a company's domain is "example.com," ThreatNG can find out if "examp1e.com" or "example.net" are registered.
Web3 Domains: ThreatNG identifies taken and available Web3 domains. As Web3 use grows, this capability becomes essential to address fraudulent websites in decentralized environments.
Email Intelligence: ThreatNG analyzes email security presence (DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records), predicts email formats, and harvests emails. This helps understand email spoofing, a common tactic to direct users to fraudulent websites.
WHOIS Intelligence: ThreatNG provides WHOIS analysis and identifies other domains owned. This can uncover connections between fraudulent websites and other potentially malicious domains.
Subdomain Intelligence: ThreatNG analyzes subdomains, HTTP responses, headers, server headers, cloud hosting, content identification (including admin pages and APIs), ports, known vulnerabilities, and web application firewall discovery. This detailed analysis can reveal vulnerabilities attackers might exploit to host fraudulent pages.
IP Intelligence: ThreatNG provides information on IPs, shared IPs, ASNs, country locations, and private IPs. This is useful for tracking down the servers hosting fraudulent websites.
Certificate Intelligence: ThreatNG analyzes TLS certificates, including their status and issuers. This can help identify suspicious certificates used by fraudulent sites.
Social Media: ThreatNG analyzes social media posts. This can help in detecting social media campaigns that promote fraudulent websites.
Sensitive Code Exposure: ThreatNG discovers public code repositories and uncovers exposed credentials, secrets, and configuration files. Attackers might use this information to create more convincing fraudulent websites or target their attacks.
Mobile Application Discovery: ThreatNG discovers mobile apps in marketplaces and analyzes their contents. Fraudulent activities can also occur within mobile applications, or fraudulent websites might be promoted.
Search Engine Exploitation: ThreatNG helps investigate an organization’s susceptibility to exposing information via search engines. Attackers might use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to make their fraudulent sites appear higher in search results.
Cloud and SaaS Exposure: ThreatNG identifies sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services and SaaS implementations, which helps identify potential cloud-based fraudulent website attacks.
Online Sharing Exposure: ThreatNG identifies an organization's presence within online code-sharing platforms. Attackers might find and leverage information on these platforms.
Sentiment and Financials: ThreatNG analyzes lawsuits, layoff chatter, SEC filings, and ESG violations. This can provide context for fraudulent website attacks, as attackers might exploit negative news or events.
Archived Web Pages: ThreatNG analyzes archived web pages. This can help understand changes to a website and identify potential spoofing tactics used to create fraudulent sites.
Dark Web Presence: ThreatNG monitors the dark web for organizational mentions, ransomware events, and compromised credentials. Compromised credentials can facilitate fraudulent website attacks.
Technology Stack: ThreatNG identifies the technologies used by the organization. Attackers might use this information to craft more convincing fraudulent sites.
ThreatNG maintains intelligence repositories for various data, including dark web information, compromised credentials, ransomware events, and domain-related data. These repositories provide context for investigating and understanding fraudulent website threats.
7. Working with Complementary Solutions
While the document doesn't detail specific integrations, ThreatNG's data and analysis capabilities can enhance other security tools:
SIEM (Security Information and Event Management): ThreatNG's findings can be integrated into a SIEM to correlate external attack surface data with internal security events, providing a more complete security picture.
SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response): ThreatNG can trigger automated responses in SOAR platforms to take down fraudulent websites or block malicious IPs.
Threat Intelligence Platforms (TIPs): ThreatNG's intelligence on domain permutations, Web3 domains, and dark web activity can enrich TIPs, improving threat detection.
Email Security Solutions: Integrating ThreatNG's Email Intelligence can enhance the detection of phishing emails that direct users to fraudulent websites.
Examples of ThreatNG Helping:
ThreatNG's Domain Name Permutations capability detects a newly registered domain that closely resembles a company's investment platform. An alert is triggered, and the security team discovers a fraudulent site designed to steal investors' money.
ThreatNG's Subdomain Intelligence identifies a subdomain on an unusual server serving a page that mimics the company's online store checkout. This indicates a potential fraudulent site for stealing customer payment information.
ThreatNG's Search Engine Exploitation feature finds that the company's job postings are being scraped and reposted on suspicious websites. Attackers could use these sites to collect personal information from job applicants under false pretenses.
Examples of ThreatNG Working with Complementary Solutions:
ThreatNG detects a fraudulent website and sends an alert to a SIEM. The SIEM correlates this with network traffic logs and endpoint detection and response (EDR) data to identify potentially affected users.
ThreatNG's threat intelligence on malicious domains is shared with a web proxy and firewall. These security tools are updated to block access to fraudulent domains.
A SOAR platform uses ThreatNG's API to automate the process of reporting the fraudulent website to relevant authorities and taking steps to protect the company's brand.
ThreatNG offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities to help organizations identify, assess, monitor, and investigate fraudulent website threats. Its intelligence repositories and investigation modules, particularly Domain Intelligence, provide valuable insights and can enhance the effectiveness of other security tools.
