• Home
  • Cyber Crime
  • Cyber warfare
  • APT
  • Data Breach
  • Deep Web
  • Digital ID
  • Hacking
  • Hacktivism
  • Intelligence
  • Internet of Things
  • Laws and regulations
  • Malware
  • Mobile
  • Reports
  • Security
  • Social Networks
  • Terrorism
  • ICS-SCADA
  • POLICIES
  • Contact me
MUST READ

Arizona woman sentenced for aiding North Korea in U.S. IT job fraud scheme

 | 

Operation CargoTalon targets Russia’s aerospace with EAGLET malware,

 | 

Unpatched flaw in EoL LG LNV5110R cameras lets hackers gain Admin access

 | 

Koske, a new AI-Generated Linux malware appears in the threat landscape

 | 

Mitel patches critical MiVoice MX-ONE Auth bypass flaw

 | 

Coyote malware is first-ever malware abusing Windows UI Automation

 | 

SonicWall fixed critical flaw in SMA 100 devices exploited in Overstep malware attacks

 | 

DSPM & AI Are Booming: $17.87B and $4.8T Markets by 2033

 | 

Stealth backdoor found in WordPress mu-Plugins folder

 | 

U.S. CISA adds CrushFTP, Google Chromium, and SysAid flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

 | 

U.S. CISA urges FCEB agencies to fix two Microsoft SharePoint flaws immediately and added them to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

 | 

Sophos fixed two critical Sophos Firewall vulnerabilities

 | 

French Authorities confirm XSS.is admin arrested in Ukraine

 | 

Microsoft linked attacks on SharePoint flaws to China-nexus actors

 | 

Cisco confirms active exploitation of ISE and ISE-PIC flaws

 | 

SharePoint under fire: new ToolShell attacks target enterprises

 | 

CrushFTP zero-day actively exploited at least since July 18

 | 

Hardcoded credentials found in HPE Aruba Instant On Wi-Fi devices

 | 

MuddyWater deploys new DCHSpy variants amid Iran-Israel conflict

 | 

U.S. CISA urges to immediately patch Microsoft SharePoint flaw adding it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

 | 
  • Home
  • Cyber Crime
  • Cyber warfare
  • APT
  • Data Breach
  • Deep Web
  • Digital ID
  • Hacking
  • Hacktivism
  • Intelligence
  • Internet of Things
  • Laws and regulations
  • Malware
  • Mobile
  • Reports
  • Security
  • Social Networks
  • Terrorism
  • ICS-SCADA
  • POLICIES
  • Contact me
  • Home
  • Cyber Crime
  • Hacking
  • Intelligence
  • Malware
  • Social Networks
  • LinkedIn – How to exploit social media for targeted attacks

LinkedIn – How to exploit social media for targeted attacks

Pierluigi Paganini November 05, 2013

 

The professional social network LinkedIn is a mine of information for any king of attackers, a Websense post described a typical attack scenario.

Recently I read an interesting post published on the Websense security labs blog on the use of social network LinkedIn for the reconnaissance phase of an attack. The concept is not new, LinkedIn is a mine of information for OSINT activities and attackers could use it to acquire a huge quantity of personal information on the targets, the social media is ideal for long term cyber espionage operation.

I’ve coined in the past a very interesting concept, the social network poisoning, to indicate the way to abuse of social network platform to spy on specific profile or to modify the sentiment of a topic of interest (e.g. PSYOPs and social both).

It’s easy to build a network of fake profiles to attract “person of interest”, to monitor their professional activity and obtain precious information for further targeted attacks (e.g. partnership, collaboration and involvement in specific projects).

Let’s imagine that someone decides to attack my profile and note that within my last publications there is a work I made for banking sector evaluating the impact of cybercrime on modern online-banking. The ill intentioned hackers could collect information in the context where I made the presentation an the person who appreciated it or that work in the same area. Well LinkedIn gives to the attacker all the instruments and knowledge to try to compromise targeted profile.

I would act in this way, after noting that the audio of my presentation was not so good due line problems I’ll send a series to fake email apparently sent by me (if hackers are skilled they can also hack my mail account 😉 ) inviting people to download a new version of the presentation with a better audio. In this case LinkedIn provides the attackers info on my activities, on my contacts, on person who follow me and email address for many of them … Do you need something else?

“Search features within the social network provide an easy way for scammers and legitimate LinkedIn users to zoom in on their target audience.  Whether you are a recruiter looking for potential candidates, a dating scammer looking for “mature gentlemen”, or an advanced attacker looking for high-profile directors within particular industry sectors, LinkedIn users have access to tools to help refine their search.  LinkedIn’s own statistics report that 5.7 billion searches were conducted on the social network in 2012.”

Another curiosity is that an attacker could be an advantage of the subscription to a LinkedIn’s Premium Account service that provide a set of useful additional features to exploit for a targeted attack (e.g. Function, Seniority Level, and Company Size). Consider also that “premium” scammers could also contact any LinkedIn member and search across a greater number of profiles … Very very cool!

The Websense post highlights are:

  • Evidence indicates a reconnaissance phase is being conducted by the actors.
  • Websense telemetry across the 7 Stage life-cycle, collected over many years, provides valuable insight to connect the dots in such attacks that operate as a precursor to more sophisticated attacks.
  • The targeting method uses existing features of the LinkedIn social network to pin-point LinkedIn users that meet the scammer’s requirements.
  • The LinkedIn profile is actively engaging with legitimate LinkedIn members, and currently has just over 400 connections.
  • The destination website is hosted on the same ASN as sites known to host exploit kits and possibly illegal websites.
  • Current payload leads to a dating site.  While social engineering is primarily being used here, this could morph into something more nefarious over time.

The popular social networking could be used also to serve malware, inducing the users to visit a compromised website, or to realize more or less complex scam.

The technique adopted by malicious actors is quite simple, attackers repeatedly view the victim profile, every LinkedIn user can see the most recent 5 users who have viewed their profile and it is very simple, so take advantage of human curiosity.

linkedin view profile spam

Victims often visit the profile of the person interested to them, in the above image the scammer has a set up a profile under the guise of “Jessica Reinsch” that reads as a link to a dating website geographically located in Switzerland and hosted on IP 82<dot>220<dot>34<dot>47.

linkedIn landing website

Despite in the specific case the dating site is used merely as a lure, an alternative use could be to use is to serve a malicious exploit.

Websense remarked that at the time of writing no malicious code was deployed on the website, but other domains on that same IP have been known to host suspicious code such as black hat SEO.

“We also see that IPs used to host the dating site are hosted within the same Autonomous System Number (ASN) as multiple Exploit Kit Command and Control URLs, including RedKit and Neutrino exploit kits.”

This profile examined by security experts at Websense is likely to have been set up to gain connections and harvest intelligence, as I explained in the first part of this post, LinkedIn provides all the necessary information to arrange a targeted attack (e.g. spear phishing, watering hole).

During the RSA Europe security conference in Amsterdam last week, the cyberdefense specialist Aamir Lakhani, who works as a solutions architect at IT services provider World Wide Technology, made an interesting presentation on the abuse of LinkedIn network to launch an attack. He described an experiment that showed the effectiveness of using fake profiles on popular social network like LinkedIn and Facebook, the attack was part of a sanctioned penetration test performed in 2012.

Security experts used the profiles pretending to represent an attractive young woman to penetrate the defenses of a U.S. Government agency as part of an exercise that shows how effective social engineering attacks even against sophisticated organizations.

The attacker captured the attention of internal personnel via social media and the real attack started after victims opened a malicious birthday card link that compromised the target systems.

“This guy had access to everything. He had the crown jewels in the system,”  The whole social media deception project involving Emily Williams lasted three months, but the penetration testing team reached its goals within one week. “After that we just kept the project going for research purposes to see how far we can go,” 

“After we performed this successful attack we got requests from other companies that wanted to try the same thing,” Lakhani said. “So we also did the same type of penetration test for very large financial institutions like banks and credit card companies, healthcare organizations and other firms, and the results were almost exactly the same.”

“Every time we include social engineering in our penetration tests we have a hundred percent success rate,””Every time we do social engineering, we get into the systems.” Lakhani said.

The lesson is beware of principal cyber threats related to social media abuse and limit to the necessary your media exposure.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Social media, LinkedIn)


facebook linkedin twitter

cyber espionage Cybercrime Hacking LinkedIn social media social network poisoning spear phishing state-sponsored attacks targeted attacks watering hole

you might also like

Pierluigi Paganini July 26, 2025
Arizona woman sentenced for aiding North Korea in U.S. IT job fraud scheme
Read more
Pierluigi Paganini July 25, 2025
Operation CargoTalon targets Russia’s aerospace with EAGLET malware,
Read more

leave a comment

newsletter

Subscribe to my email list and stay
up-to-date!

    recent articles

    Arizona woman sentenced for aiding North Korea in U.S. IT job fraud scheme

    Intelligence / July 26, 2025

    Operation CargoTalon targets Russia’s aerospace with EAGLET malware,

    Intelligence / July 25, 2025

    Unpatched flaw in EoL LG LNV5110R cameras lets hackers gain Admin access

    Security / July 25, 2025

    Koske, a new AI-Generated Linux malware appears in the threat landscape

    Malware / July 25, 2025

    Mitel patches critical MiVoice MX-ONE Auth bypass flaw

    Security / July 25, 2025

    To contact me write an email to:

    Pierluigi Paganini :
    pierluigi.paganini@securityaffairs.co

    LEARN MORE

    QUICK LINKS

    • Home
    • Cyber Crime
    • Cyber warfare
    • APT
    • Data Breach
    • Deep Web
    • Digital ID
    • Hacking
    • Hacktivism
    • Intelligence
    • Internet of Things
    • Laws and regulations
    • Malware
    • Mobile
    • Reports
    • Security
    • Social Networks
    • Terrorism
    • ICS-SCADA
    • POLICIES
    • Contact me

    Copyright@securityaffairs 2024

    We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept All”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. However, you may visit "Cookie Settings" to provide a controlled consent.
    Cookie SettingsAccept All
    Manage consent

    Privacy Overview

    This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities...
    Necessary
    Always Enabled
    Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
    Non-necessary
    Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
    SAVE & ACCEPT