Description

On December 24, 2022, researchers at a blockchain security firm SlowMist found a suspected APT group targeting NFT users in a massive phishing campaign, that has been active for the past seven months. While, on September 4, 2022, a Twitter user named 'PhantomXsec' linked this massive phishing campaign to the North Korea-based Lazarus threat group and found 196 phishing domains being used by the same group. As per reports, the attack begins with spam emails containing links to the phishing pages, and then if a victim clicks on the attached link, they are taken to those phishing sites with the same branding and layout. Later, the victims are asked to provide personal information and investment details, which are then transferred to the attackers. As a result, the Lazarus group has full access to victims' assets, which includes their approval records and signature data. After appropriate investigation, SlowMist found that this phishing attack had utilized fake NFT-related decoy websites with infection techniques and nearly 500 domains to target Crypto and NFT users, in which the earliest registration date for these domain names is 7 months back, and the latest site claims to be associated with the World Cup. It is also reported that, the North Korean hackers also use some unique phishing traits, in which, one of the traits was that phishing websites which record visitor data and store it on external sites via an HTTP GET request. Although the domain names sending the request are different, the API interface of the request is common "/postAddr.php". In some other attacks, the phishing websites use the HTTP request path "getPriceData.php" to get an item price list for NFT items, and also use a file named 'imgSrc.js' containing a list of target sites and the hosting location of the image files used on their respective phishing sites. Further investigating the campaign, researchers found that the APT group is primarily monitoring user requests through the main domain “thedoodles.site”, which was primarily used to record user data in its early days. In 7 months, the HTTPS certificate for this domain name was queried, indicating the hacker organization had already begun targeting NFT users.