@BushidoToken Threat Intel

Online and at conferences, people ask me how to get started in threat intel. What I usually offer as advice to budding analysts starting out is to practise analysing things in the wild. And by 'analysing things in the wild' I mean looking for live reports of cybercriminal activity by others online. One of my favourite examples is SMS phishing text messages, also called Smishing scams.  It is a commonly held view that new analysts learn best by doing. It also does not matter if you are not the first to report on something. New analysts should not worry about that, as long as they do a bit of OSINT at least to confirm they do not accidentally say they are the first and only researcher to find whatever it is they found.  In my experience, there are always organizations and teams with more experience and telemetry than you. It's just that they did not report on it publicly (yet). This goes for even the top research teams at incident response or antivirus companies. Not "be...

  There is no doubt that mobile banking has taken the world by storm. Another growth industry is digital-only banks, especially in the UK. As of January 2022, over a quarter (27%) of British adults have opened an account with a digital-only bank, equating to 14 million people. This has created a new pool of targets for phishing threat actors to create new campaigns for fraud. This blog will explore a recent and ongoing campaign targeting mobile users and digital-only banks.  Monzo is a popular digital-only bank in the UK. For years, users are able to open an account without having to visit a branch just by walking through the steps in the mobile application. One of the key parts to creating a Monzo account is verifying your device. Monzo will send you a "golden link" which you use to login to for the first time (see Fig. 1). This is what the phishing threat actors are after. Fig. 1 - Example "golden link" sent via Monzo to login to bank accounts Fig. 2 - Example SM...