Since July 2021, WMC Global analysts have been tracking an emerging threat actor known as MRWEEBEE who is creating and selling phishing kits targeting customers of banks and credit unions in the United States. WMC Global threat analysts have been monitoring MRWEEBEE closely by investigating the threat actor’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) found in their phishing kits. WMC Analysts paid close attention to how MRWEEBEE's kits collect personal identifiable information (PII), email credentials, banking details, payment information, and how they evade detection with extensive bot blocking.

SuMMARY

Phishing campaigns continue to utilize the disruption of the pandemic to target victims, and a new campaign takes advantage of Zoom's rising popularity. Since December, the "Compact" Campaign has been targeting thousands of users by impersonating a Zoom invite and is estimated to have collected over 400,000 Outlook Web Access and Office 365 credentials. This campaign is unique in its use of trusted domains to ensure delivery of phishing emails and preventing phishing pages from being blocked. This is especially worrisome for organizations who will struggle to defend against this attack.

Phishing attacks have been on the rise in recent years, and 2020 in particular has seen a stark increase in phishing incidents since the start of the pandemic in January[i]. Tech companies and banks are the most commonly impersonated companies in phishing scams, which steal their victims credentials and other sensitive data and send them to the scammer[ii]. 

At WMC Global, we analyze hundreds of phishing kits every week, which use a range of lures to steal credentials from victims, and we examine the exfiltration mechanisms used by threat actors to harvest stolen credentials from victims. The majority of phishing kits use a simple email exfiltration method to send victims’ data—compromised credentials—to a mailbox owned by the threat actor; the second most common method of exfiltration was writing the stolen data to a file stored on the website host. Though there are many exfiltration methods available to threat actors, our analysis found email and file write exfiltration to be amongst the most common.