LinkedIn Phishing Email Enumeration

Using an automated web bot, it is possible to scrape personnel names and then translate those names into emails that can be used in phishing campaigns. Proof of concept uploaded to Github.

Creating the LinkedIn Web Bot

While testing, it was identified that LinkedIn will temporarily disable accounts suspected of employing bot automation (and presumably with enough violations, could result in permanent deletion of account).

The team found that by rate-limiting requests at varied intervals and limiting total daily requests to less that 800, we were able to use automated bots on the network without having the accounts suspended.

Bot Operations

The proof of concept bot does the following:

Logs into LinkedIn using an existing account
Searches the supplied company name
Narrows the search to return "People" objects
Opens Advanced Search options, and selects only individuals that currently work at the company
Progressively clicks through 100 pages of profiles and gathers names
Converts the names into emails based on a known-naming convention

Github Repository

Github - LinkedIn Mail Scraper

Demonstration

Comments

Bypassing CAPTCHA with Visually-Impaired Robots

As many of you have probably noticed, we rely heavily on bot automation for a lot of the testing that we do at Sociosploit. And occasionally, we run into sites that leverage CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart") controls to prevent bot automation. Even if you aren't familiar with the name, you've likely encountered these before. While there are some other vendors who develop CAPTCHAs, Google is currently the leader in CAPTCHA technology. They currently support 2 products (reCAPTCHA v2 and v3). As v3 natively only functions as a detective control, I focused my efforts more on identifying ways to possibly bypass reCAPTCHA v2 (which functions more as a preventative control). How reCAPTCHA v2 Works reCAPTCHA v2 starts with a simple checkbox, and evaluates the behavior of the user when clicking it. While I haven't dissected the underlying operations, I assume this part of the test likely makes determination

Building Bots with Mechanize and Selenium

The Sociosploit team conducts much of its research into the exploitation of social media using custom built bots. On occasion, the team will use public APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), but more often than not, these do not provide the same level of exploitative capabilities that could be achieved through browser automation. So to achieve this end, the Sociosploit team primarily uses a combination of two different Python libraries for building web bots for research. Each of the libraries have their own advantages and disadvantages. These libraries include: Mechanize Pros: Very lightweight, portable, and requires minimal resources Easy to initially configure and install Cuts down on superfluous requests (due to absense of JavaScript) Cons: Does not handle JavaScript or client-side functionality Troubleshooting is done exclusively in text Selenium Pros: Operations are executed in browser, making JavaScript rendering and manipulation easy Visibility of browse

Another "Fappening" on the Horizon?

So in case you aren't fully up-to-speed on useless hacker trivia, "The Fappening" (also sometimes referred to as "Celebgate") was a series of targeted end-user cyber attacks which occurred back in 2014 (which strangely feels like forever in tech years), that resulted in unauthorized access to the iCloud accounts of several prominent celebrity figures. Following these breaches, photographs (for many including personal sexually explicit or nude photos) of the celebrities were then publicly released online. Most evidence points to the attack vector being spear phishing email attacks which directed the victims to a fake icloud login site, and then collected the victim's credentials to subsequently access their real icloud accounts. Migration to MFA In response to these events, Apple has made iCloud one of the very few social web services that implements compulsory MFA ("Multi-Factor Authentication"). But while they might be ahead of the indust

SocioSploit

Search This Blog