Website Spoofing

Website spoofing, also known as domain spoofing, is a cybercrime in which an attacker creates a fake website that mimics a legitimate one to trick users. The goal is often to steal sensitive information like login credentials, credit card numbers, or personal data. These fraudulent sites can be almost identical to the real ones, replicating their design, logos, and content to deceive visitors.

How Website Spoofing Works

Attackers use several methods to create and direct users to these fake websites:

• Typosquatting: This is a common technique where an attacker registers a domain name that is a common misspelling of a legitimate, popular website. For example, they might register "https://www.google.com/search?q=goggle.com" instead of "google.com". Other variations include adding extra characters, omitting letters, or using a different top-level domain (TLD) like .net instead of .com. A user who accidentally mistypes the URL can be redirected to the fake site.

• Homoglyph Attacks: This sophisticated method uses characters from different alphabets or character sets that look visually similar to one another. For instance, an attacker might replace the Latin letter "o" with the Cyrillic letter "о" to create a domain that looks identical to the real one. This makes it very difficult for a user to spot the fake URL by just looking at it.

• Deceptive URLs and Links: Attackers often combine website spoofing with other social engineering tactics, such as phishing emails or text messages. The spoofed website's URL is embedded in a malicious link, and a user who clicks on it is taken directly to the fraudulent site. The URL in the address bar may look legitimate at first glance, but a closer inspection often reveals slight alterations.

Red Flags to Watch For

Even with a convincing fake site, some signs can help you identify a spoofed website:

• URL Anomalies: Always check the URL for misspellings, extra characters, or unusual domain extensions. Be cautious of URLs that contain hyphens or words that don't belong, such as mycompany-login.com.

• No HTTPS or a Lock Icon: Most legitimate websites today use HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) to encrypt traffic, which is indicated by a padlock icon in the browser's address bar. While a padlock is not a guarantee of legitimacy, its absence is a major red flag.

• Poor Design and Errors: Scrutinize the website for low-quality images, blurry logos, and grammatical errors, which are often signs of a fake site.

• Unexpected Requests: Be cautious of sites that request sensitive information or prompt you to download unexpected software.

ThreatNG helps combat website spoofing by acting as an external attack surface management and digital risk protection solution. It works by discovering and assessing an organization's publicly exposed digital assets to identify potential vulnerabilities that an attacker could use to create a spoofed website.

External Discovery and Assessment

ThreatNG's External Discovery can perform external, unauthenticated discovery to find look-alike websites and other malicious domains. This is a crucial step for finding fake sites that impersonate an organization. The External Assessment capabilities evaluate an organization's susceptibility to website spoofing.

• Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: ThreatNG analyzes parts of a web application that are accessible from the outside world to identify potential entry points for attackers. This intelligence is based on its Domain Intelligence module. For example, ThreatNG might find that an organization's publicly accessible web portal is vulnerable to a redirect attack, which an attacker could use to send users to a spoofed login page.

• Subdomain Takeover Susceptibility: ThreatNG evaluates this by analyzing a website's subdomains, DNS records, and SSL certificate statuses. This helps identify vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to take control of a subdomain and host a spoofed page that looks legitimate.

• Brand Damage Susceptibility: This assessment considers external attack surface intelligence, digital risk intelligence, and Domain Intelligence (including domain name permutations) to determine the risk of damage to a brand's reputation from a spoofing attack.

Investigation Modules

ThreatNG's Investigation Modules provide in-depth analysis to track down and understand a spoofing threat.

• Domain Intelligence: This module is central to fighting website spoofing. Its DNS Intelligence capabilities, specifically the Domain Name Permutations feature, are designed to find look-alike domains. It can find domains with common misspellings (typosquatting), additions, omissions, or even homoglyphs (characters that look alike) across various top-level domains. For example, ThreatNG can detect a newly registered domain like mycompany-login.com or mycornpany.com, which is a strong indicator of a spoofing attempt.

• Archived Web Pages: This module finds archived versions of an organization's online presence, which can help in identifying historical spoofing attacks or compromised pages.

• Sensitive Code Exposure: This module discovers public code repositories and their exposure levels. This is important because attackers might use sensitive data, such as API keys or configuration files found in exposed code, to create a more convincing spoofed website.

Intelligence Repositories

ThreatNG's continuously updated Intelligence Repositories (branded as DarCache) provide critical context for website spoofing investigations.

• Compromised Credentials (DarCache Rupture): This repository tracks compromised credentials on the dark web. If an attacker plans a spoofing attack to steal credentials, the presence of already-compromised credentials for an organization could indicate a heightened risk.

• Vulnerabilities (DarCache Vulnerability): This repository helps prioritize risks by providing a holistic view of external vulnerabilities. By understanding the real-world exploitability of known vulnerabilities, a security team can prioritize remediation efforts on those that could be used to facilitate a website spoofing attack.

Reporting and Continuous Monitoring

ThreatNG provides various reports to communicate the findings of its spoofing tests. Prioritized reports categorize risks as high, medium, low, and informational, helping organizations focus on the most critical threats. The reports also offer reasoning, recommendations, and reference links to provide context and guidance for risk mitigation. ThreatNG's Continuous Monitoring capability ensures that the external attack surface and security ratings are constantly being tracked, so a new spoofed domain or vulnerability is detected as soon as it appears.

Complementary Solutions

ThreatNG's capabilities can work with other security solutions to create a more robust defense against website spoofing.

• DNS Protection Services: ThreatNG's DNS Intelligence can identify a newly registered malicious domain that is impersonating a company. This information can be used by a DNS protection service to block users from accessing the fraudulent site.

• Phishing Simulation and Security Awareness Training: ThreatNG can provide real-world examples of discovered spoofed websites. These examples can be used in security awareness training programs to educate employees on how to spot and avoid falling for a spoofed site. This helps to build a human firewall that complements ThreatNG's technical controls.

• SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) Platforms: When ThreatNG's continuous monitoring detects a new, potentially spoofed domain, it can trigger an automated workflow in a SOAR platform. This playbook could automatically notify the security team, create a task to investigate the site, and even initiate a domain takedown request to the registrar.