Cybercriminals Exploit HTTP Headers for Credential Theft via Large-Scale Phishing Attacks
Sep 16, 2024
Threat Detection / Email Security
Cybersecurity researchers have warned of ongoing phishing campaigns that abuse refresh entries in HTTP headers to deliver spoofed email login pages that are designed to harvest users' credentials. "Unlike other phishing webpage distribution behavior through HTML content, these attacks use the response header sent by a server, which occurs before the processing of the HTML content," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Yu Zhang, Zeyu You, and Wei Wang said . "Malicious links direct the browser to automatically refresh or reload a web page immediately, without requiring user interaction." Targets of the large-scale activity, observed between May and July 2024, include large corporations in South Korea, as well as government agencies and schools in the U.S. As many as 2,000 malicious URLs have been associated with the campaigns. Over 36% of the attacks have singled out the business-and-economy sector, followed by financial services (12.9%), government (6.9%)