An ongoing phishing campaign aimed at U.S. government contractors now includes much larger baits and better-crafted documents. Attackers are now soliciting bids for lucrative government projects and redirecting them to phishing sites that look like legitimate federal agency portals.
There are now a variety of lures used in the messages including improved phishing web page behavior, and the removal of artifacts that revealed fraud in previous versions of the attached PDF.
Threat actors are also trying to get visitors to enter their Microsoft Office 365 account details, and a step has been added to the Captcha Challenge to ensure that they do not log bot input.
This has been happening since January 2022, with threat actors attaching PDFs with instructions to tender for projects from the US Department of Labour. The operatives have broadened their scope and are now impersonating the Department of Transportation and Commerce.
In addition, there are now a variety of different baits used in the messages, improved phishing web page behavior, and the removal of artifacts that have exposed fraud in previous versions.
Building on what they have already achieved, the agents have made careful revisions that include more coherent formatting, larger logos, matching metadata with the counterfeit department, using HTTPS on all websites in the same domain, and a preference for inserting a link to the PDF instead of attaching the file.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.