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FireEye, a US cybersecurity firm, have disclosed details about their DNS hijacking campaign. In their recent report, the company shared that they have identified huge DNS hijacking affecting multiple domains belonging to government, telecommunications and internet infrastructure entities across the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and North America.

FireEye analysts believe an Iranian-based group is the source behind these attacks, although they do not have a definitive proof. The analysts also said that “they have been tracking this activity for several months, mapping and understanding the innovative tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) deployed by the attacker”.

The FireEye Intelligence team has also identified an access from Iranian IPs to machines used to intercept, record and forward network traffic. The team also mentions that these IP addresses were previously observed during the response to an intrusion attributed to Iranian cyber espionage actors. The FireEye report highlights three different techniques used to conduct these attacks.

Techniques to manipulate the DNS records and enable victim compromises

1. Altering DNS A Records

Source: FireEye

Here the attackers first logged into a proxy box used to conduct non-attributed browsing and as a jumpbox to other infrastructure. The attacker then logs into the DNS provider’s administration panel, utilising previously compromised credentials. Attackers change the DNS records for victim’s mail server in order to redirect it to their own mail server.

They have used Let’s Encrypt certificates to support HTTPS traffic, and a load balancer to redirect victims back to the real email server after they’ve collected login credentials from victims on their shadow server. The username, password and domain credentials are harvested and stored.

2. Altering DNS NS Records

Source: FireEye

This technique is the same as the previous one. However, here the attacker exploits a previously compromised registrar or ccTLD.

3. A DNS Redirector

Source: FireEye

This technique is a conjunction of the previous two. The DNS Redirector is an attacker operations box which responds to DNS requests. Here, if the domain is from inside the company, OP2 responds with an attacker-controlled IP address, and the user is re-directed to the attacker-controlled infrastructure.

Analysts said that a large number of organizations have been affected by this pattern of DNS record manipulation and fraudulent SSL certificates. These include telecoms and ISP providers, internet infrastructure providers, government and sensitive commercial entities.

According to FireEye report, “While the precise mechanism by which the DNS records were changed is unknown, we believe that at least some records were changed by compromising a victim’s domain registrar account.”

To know more about this news in detail, read the FireEye report.

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