Hackers Increasingly Using HTML Smuggling in Malware and Phishing Attacks
Nov 12, 2021
Threat actors are increasingly banking on the technique of HTML smuggling in phishing campaigns as a means to gain initial access and deploy an array of threats, including banking malware, remote administration trojans (RATs), and ransomware payloads. Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team, in a new report published Thursday, disclosed that it identified infiltrations distributing the Mekotio banking Trojan, backdoors such as AsyncRAT and NjRAT , and the infamous TrickBot malware. The multi-staged attacks — dubbed ISOMorph — were also publicly documented by Menlo Security in July 2021. HTML smuggling is an approach that allows an attacker to "smuggle" first-stage droppers, often encoded malicious scripts embedded within specially-crafted HTML attachments or web pages, on a victim machine by taking advantage of basic features in HTML5 and JavaScript rather than exploiting a vulnerability or a design flaw in modern web browsers. By doing so, it enables