Venafi Research: Large Number of Look-Alike Domains Pose Phishing Risks to Online Shoppers

Fake domains can be used to steal sensitive account and payment data

SALT LAKE CITY–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#Cybersecurity—Venafi^®,
the leading provider of machine identity protection, today released
research on the explosion of look-alike domains, which are routinely
used to steal sensitive data from online shoppers. Venafi’s research
analyzed suspicious domains targeting the top 20 retailers in five key
markets: the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Australia.

As the rate of online shopping increases, customers are being targeted
through look-alike domains. Cyber attackers create these fake domains by
substituting a few characters in the URLs. Because they point to
malicious online shopping sites that mimic legitimate, well-known retail
websites, it makes it increasingly difficult for customers to detect the
fake domains. Additionally, given that many of these malicious pages use
a trusted TLS certificate, they appear to be safe for online shoppers
who unknowingly provide sensitive account information and payment data.

“Domain spoofing has always been a cornerstone technique of web attacks
that focus on social engineering, and the movement to encrypt all web
traffic does not shield legitimate retailers against this very common
technique,” said Jing Xie, senior threat intelligence analyst for
Venafi. “Because malicious domains now must have a legitimate TLS
certificate in order to function, many companies feel that certificate
issuers should own the responsibility of vetting the security of these
certificates. In spite of significant advances in the best practices
followed by certificate issuers, this is a really bad idea.”

“No organization should rely exclusively on certificate authorities to
detect suspicious certificate requests,” continued Xie. “For example,
cyber attackers recently set up a look-alike
domain for NewEgg, a website with over 50 million visitors a month.
The look-alike domain used a trusted TLS certificate issued by the
CA who followed all the best practices and baseline requirements. This
phishing website was used to steal account and credit card data for over
a month before it was shut down by security researchers.”

According to Venafi’s research, there has been an explosion in the
number of potentially fraudulent domains. There are more than double the
number of look-alike domains compared to legitimate domains, and every
online retailer studied is being targeted.

Key findings from the research include:

• The total number of certificates for look-alike domains is more than
  200 percent greater than the number of authentic retail domains.
• Among the top 20 online German retailers, there are almost four times
  more look-alike domains than valid domains.
• Major retailers present larger targets for cyber criminals. One of the
  top 20 U.S. retailers has over 12,000 look-alike domains targeting
  their customers.
• The growth in look-alike domains appears to be connected to the
  availability of free TLS certificates; 84 percent of the look-alike
  domains studied use free certificates from Let’s Encrypt.

As the holiday shopping season approaches, there will likely be an
increase in look-alike domains. For online retailers that discover
malicious domains, they can take several steps to protect their
customers:

• Search and report suspicious domains using Google Safe Browsing.
  Google Safe Browsing is an industry anti-phishing service that
  identifies and blacklists dangerous websites. Retailers can report a
  domain at https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_general/.
• Report suspicious domains to the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG).
  The APWG is an international voluntary organization that focuses on
  limiting cyber crime perpetrated through phishing. Retailers can
  report a suspicious domain at https://www.antiphishing.org/report-phishing/
  or via email to reportphishing@apwg.org.
• Add Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA) to the DNS records of
  domains and subdomains. CAA lets organizations determine which CAs
  can issue certificates for domains they own. It is an extension of the
  domain’s DNS record and supports property tags that let domain owners
  set CA policy for entire domains or for specific hostnames.
• Leverage software packages to search for suspicious domains.
  Copyright infringement software may help retailers find malicious
  websites, stopping the unauthorized use of their logos or brands.
  Solutions that also provide anti-phishing functionality can help aid
  in the search for look-alike domains.

“Ultimately, we should expect even more malicious look-alike
websites designed for social engineering to pop up in the future,”
concluded Xie. “In order to protect themselves, enterprises need
effective means to discover domains that have a high probability of
being malicious through monitoring and analyzing certificate
transparency logs. This way they can leverage many recent industry
advances to spot high-risk certificate registrations, crippling
malicious sites before they cause damage by taking away their
certificates.”

For more information, please visit: https://www.venafi.com/resource/Venafi-Research-Brief-The-Risk-Lookalike-Domains-Pose-to-Online-Retailers

Additional Resource:

Blog:
Venafi Retail Research: Will Holiday Shoppers be Duped By Look-alike
Domains?

About Venafi

Venafi is the cyber security market leader in machine identity
protection, securing connections and communications between machines.
Venafi protects machine identity types by orchestrating cryptographic
keys and digital certificates for SSL/TLS, IoT, mobile and SSH. Venafi
provides global visibility of machine identities and the risks
associated with them for the extended enterprise—on premises, mobile,
virtual, cloud and IoT—at machine speed and scale. Venafi puts this
intelligence into action with automated remediation that reduces the
security and availability risks connected with weak or compromised
machine identities while safeguarding the flow of information to trusted
machines and preventing communication with machines that are not trusted.

With over 30 patents, Venafi delivers innovative solutions for the
world’s most demanding, security-conscious Global 5000 organizations,
including the top five U.S. health insurers; the top five U.S. airlines;
four of the top five U.S., U.K., Australian and South African banks; and
four of the top five U.S. retailers. For more information, visit: http://venafi.com.

Contacts

Venafi
Shelley Boose, 408-398-6987
shelley.boose@venafi.com