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The top-level domain for the United States — .US — is home to thousands of newly-registered domains tied to a malicious link shortening service that facilitates malware and phishing scams, new research suggests. The findings come close on the heels of a report that identified .US domains as among the most prevalent in phishing attacks over the past year.
Researchers at Infoblox say they’ve been tracking what appears to be a three-year-old link shortening service that is catering to phishers and malware purveyors. Infoblox found the domains involved are typically three to seven characters long, and hosted on bulletproof hosting providers that charge a premium to ignore any abuse or legal complaints. The short domains don’t host any content themselves, but are used to obfuscate the real address of landing pages that try to phish users or install malware.
A graphic describing the operations of a malicious link shortening service that Infoblox has dubbed “Prolific Puma.”
Infoblox says it’s unclear how the phishing and malware landing pages tied to this service are being initially promoted, although they suspect it is mainly through scams targeting people on their phones via SMS. A new report says the company mapped the contours of this link shortening service thanks in part to pseudo-random patterns in the short domains, which all appear on the surface to be a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers.
“This came to our attention because we have systems that detect registrations that use domain name generation algorithms,” said Renee Burton, head of threat intelligence at Infoblox. “We have not found any legitimate content served through their shorteners.”
Infoblox determined that until May 2023, domains ending in .info accounted for the bulk of new registrations tied to the malicious link shortening service, which Infoblox has dubbed “Prolific Puma.” Since then, they found that whoever is responsible for running the service has used .US for approximately 55 percent of the total domains created, with several dozen new malicious .US domains registered daily.
.US is overseen by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an executive branch agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. But Uncle Sam has long outsourced the management of .US to various private companies, which have gradually allowed the United States’s top-level domain to devolve into a cesspool of phishing activity.
Or so concludes The Interisle Consulting Group, which gathers phishing data from multiple industry sources and publishes an annual report on the latest trends. As far back as 2018, Interisle found .US domains were the worst in the world for spam, botnet (attack infrastructure for DDOS etc.) and illicit or harmful content.
Interisle’s newest study examined six million phishing reports between May 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023, and identified approximately 30,000 .US phishing domains. Interisle found significant numbers of .US domains were registered to attack some of the United States’ most prominent companies, including Bank of America, Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Citi, Comcast, Microsoft, Meta, and Target. Others were used to impersonate or attack U.S. government agencies.
Under NTIA regulations, domain registrars processing .US domain registrations must take certain steps (PDF) to verify that those customers actually reside in the United States, or else own organizations based in the U.S. However, if one registers a .US domain through GoDaddy — the largest domain registrar and the current administrator of the .US contract — the way one “proves” their U.S. nexus is simply by choosing from one of three pre-selected affirmative responses.
In an age when most domain registrars are automatically redacting customer information from publicly accessible registration records to avoid running afoul of European privacy laws, .US has remained something of an outlier because its charter specifies that all registration records be made public. However, Infoblox said it found more than 2,000 malicious link shortener domains ending in .US registered since October 2023 through NameSilo that have somehow subverted the transparency requirements for the usTLD and converted to private registrations.
“Through our own experience with NameSilo, it is not possible to select private registration for domains in the usTLD through their interface,” Infoblox wrote. “And yet, it was done. Of the total domains with private records, over 99% were registered with NameSilo. At this time, we are not able to explain this behavior.”
NameSilo CEO Kristaps Ronka said the company actively responds to reports about abusive domains, but that it hasn’t seen any abuse reports related to Infoblox’s findings.
“We take down hundreds to thousands of domains, lots of them proactively to combat abuse,” Ronka said. “Our current abuse rate on abuseIQ for example is currently at 0%. AbuseIQ receives reports from countless sources and we are yet to see these ‘Puma’ abuse reports.”
Experts who track domains associated with malware and phishing say even phony information supplied at registration is useful in identifying potentially malicious or phishous domains before they can be used for abuse.
For example, when it was registered through NameSilo in July 2023, the domain 1ox[.]us — like thousands of others — listed its registrant as “Leila Puma” at a street address in Poland, and the email address blackpumaoct33@ukr.net. But according to DomainTools.com, on Oct. 1, 2023 those records were redacted and hidden by NameSilo.
Infoblox notes that the username portion of the email address appears to be a reference to the song October 33 by the Black Pumas, an Austin, Texas based psychedelic soul band. The Black Pumas aren’t exactly a household name, but they did recently have a popular Youtube video that featured a cover of the Kinks song “Strangers,” which included an emotional visual narrative about Ukrainians seeking refuge from the Russian invasion, titled “Ukraine Strangers.” Also, Leila Puma’s email address is at a Ukrainian email provider.
DomainTools shows that hundreds of other malicious domains tied to Prolific Puma previously were registered through NameCheap to a “Josef Bakhovsky” at a different street address in Poland. According to ancestry.com, the anglicized version of this surname — Bakovski — is the traditional name for someone from Bakowce, which is now known as Bakivtsi and is in Ukraine.
This possible Polish and/or Ukrainian connection may or may not tell us something about the “who” behind this link shortening service, but those details are useful for identifying and grouping these malicious short domains. However, even this meager visibility into .US registration data is now under threat.
The NTIA recently published a proposal that would allow registrars to redact all registrant data from WHOIS registration records for .US domains. A broad array of industry groups have filed comments opposing the proposed changes, saying they threaten to remove the last vestiges of accountability for a top-level domain that is already overrun with cybercrime activity.
Infoblox’s Burton says Prolific Puma is remarkable because they’ve been able to facilitate malicious activities for years while going largely unnoticed by the security industry.
“This exposes how persistent the criminal economy can be at a supply chain level,” Burton said. “We’re always looking at the end malware or phishing page, but what we’re finding here is that there’s this middle layer of DNS threat actors persisting for years without notice.”
Infoblox’s full report on Prolific Puma is here.
Domain names ending in “.US” — the top-level domain for the United States — are among the most prevalent in phishing scams, new research shows. This is noteworthy because .US is overseen by the U.S. government, which is frequently the target of phishing domains ending in .US. Also, .US domains are only supposed to be available to U.S. citizens and to those who can demonstrate that they have a physical presence in the United States.
.US is the “country code top-level domain” or ccTLD of the United States. Most countries have their own ccTLDs: .MX for Mexico, for example, or .CA for Canada. But few other major countries in the world have anywhere near as many phishing domains each year as .US.
That’s according to The Interisle Consulting Group, which gathers phishing data from multiple industry sources and publishes an annual report on the latest trends. Interisle’s newest study examined six million phishing reports between May 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023, and found 30,000 .US phishing domains.
.US is overseen by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an executive branch agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. However, NTIA currently contracts out the management of the .US domain to GoDaddy, by far the world’s largest domain registrar.
Under NTIA regulations, the administrator of the .US registry must take certain steps to verify that their customers actually reside in the United States, or own organizations based in the U.S. But Interisle found that whatever GoDaddy was doing to manage that vetting process wasn’t working.
“The .US ‘nexus’ requirement theoretically limits registrations to parties with a national connection, but .US had very high numbers of phishing domains,” Interisle wrote. “This indicates a possible problem with the administration or application of the nexus requirements.”
Dean Marks is emeritus executive director for a group called the Coalition for Online Accountability, which has been critical of the NTIA’s stewardship of .US. Marks says virtually all European Union member state ccTLDs that enforce nexus restrictions also have massively lower levels of abuse due to their policies and oversight.
“Even very large ccTLDs, like .de for Germany — which has a far larger market share of domain name registrations than .US — have very low levels of abuse, including phishing and malware,” Marks told KrebsOnSecurity. “In my view, this situation with .US should not be acceptable to the U.S. government overall, nor to the US public.”
Marks said there are very few phishing domains ever registered in other ccTLDs that also restrict registrations to their citizens, such as .HU (Hungary), .NZ (New Zealand), and .FI (Finland), where a connection to the country, a proof of identity, or evidence of incorporation are required.
“Or .LK (Sri Lanka), where the acceptable use policy includes a ‘lock and suspend’ if domains are reported for suspicious activity,” Marks said. “These ccTLDs make a strong case for validating domain registrants in the interest of public safety.”
Sadly, .US has been a cesspool of phishing activity for many years. As far back as 2018, Interisle found .US domains were the worst in the world for spam, botnet (attack infrastructure for DDOS etc.) and illicit or harmful content. Back then, .US was being operated by a different contractor.
In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, GoDaddy said all .US registrants must certify that they meet the NTIA’s nexus requirements. But this appears to be little more than an affirmative response that is already pre-selected for all new registrants.
Attempting to register a .US domain through GoDaddy, for example, leads to a U.S. Registration Information page that auto-populates the nexus attestation field with the response, “I am a citizen of the US.” Other options include, “I am a permanent resident of the US,” and “My primary domicile is in the US.” It currently costs just $4.99 to obtain a .US domain through GoDaddy.
GoDaddy said it also conducts a scan of selected registration request information, and conducts “spot checks” on registrant information.
“We conduct regular reviews, per policy, of registration data within the Registry database to determine Nexus compliance with ongoing communications to registrars and registrants,” the company said in a written statement.
GoDaddy says it “is committed to supporting a safer online environment and proactively addressing this issue by assessing it against our own anti-abuse mitigation system.”
“We stand against DNS abuse in any form and maintain multiple systems and protocols to protect all the TLDs we operate,” the statement continued. “We will continue to work with registrars, cybersecurity firms and other stakeholders to make progress with this complex challenge.”
Interisle found significant numbers of .US domains were registered to attack some of the United States’ most prominent companies, including Bank of America, Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Citi, Comcast, Microsoft, Meta, and Target.
“Ironically, at least 109 of the .US domains in our data were used to attack the United States government, specifically the United States Postal Service and its customers,” Interisle wrote. “.US domains were also used to attack foreign government operations: six .US domains were used to attack Australian government services, six attacked Great’s Britain’s Royal Mail, one attacked Canada Post, and one attacked the Denmark Tax Authority.”
The NTIA recently published a proposal that would allow GoDaddy to redact registrant data from WHOIS registration records. The current charter for .US specifies that all .US registration records be public.
Interisle argues that without more stringent efforts to verify a United States nexus for new .US domain registrants, the NTIA’s proposal will make it even more difficult to identify phishers and verify registrants’ identities and nexus qualifications.
In a written statement, the NTIA said DNS abuse is a priority issue for the agency, and that NTIA supports “evidence-based policymaking.”
“We look forward to reviewing the report and will engage with our contractor for the .US domain on steps that we can take not only to address phishing, but the other forms of DNS abuse as well,” the statement reads.
Interisle sources its phishing data from several places, including the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), OpenPhish, PhishTank, and Spamhaus. For more phishing facts, see Interisle’s 2023 Phishing Landscape report (PDF).’
Update, Sept. 5, 1:44 p.m. ET: Updated story with statement provided today by the NTIA.
In our last blog, we gave a rundown of what the Telecommunications (Security) Act (TSA) is, why it’s been introduced, who it affects, when it starts, and how firms can prepare. Here, we take a closer look into the themes introduced by the Act, explore how the telecoms industry can explore zero trust to further improve its security posture, and outline the benefits that can be gained when complying.
When the Telecoms Security Act (TSA) was introduced, it was labelled as ‘one of the strongest telecoms security regimes in the world, a rise in standards across the board, set by the government rather than the industry’ by Matt Warman, former Minister of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. The industry is certainly feeling the impending impact of the act – with one industry pundit at an event we ran recently describing it as a ‘multi-generational change’ for the sector.
One of the headline grabbers stemming from the Act are the associated fines. With the new powers granted to it by the Act, Ofcom now has the responsibility to oversee operators’ security policies and impose fines of up to 10 percent of turnover or £100,000 a day in case operators don’t comply or the blanket ban of telecoms vendors such as Huawei. Sounds like the typical ‘stick’-based costly compliance messaging that no-one particularly wants to hear, right? But what if the TSA had some ‘carrot’-based business benefits that are much less discussed?
The TSA introduces a new security framework for the UK telecoms sector to ensure that public telecommunications providers operate secure and resilient networks and services and manage their supply chains appropriately. ny of the themes introduced in the code of practice can be aligned with the themes in a zero trust security model, which are also a focus for CISOs.
Zero trust security is a concept (also known as ‘never trust, always verify’) which establishes trust in users and devices through authentication and continuous monitoring of each access attempt, with custom security policies that protect every application. At Duo, our approach to zero trust is:
A crucial point to note here: much like a solution that claims to help with all aspects of the TSA, telecom providers should be wary of any vendor who claims to have a zero-trust product. Both are far much bigger than any ‘silver bullet’ solution purports to offer. But there is a good reason a zero-trust framework has been mandated by the US White House for all federal agencies, and recommended by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
As well as helping to mitigate the significant cyber risks presented to the telecoms industry, a zero-trust strategy provides many business benefits. Our recent Guide to Zero Trust Maturity shows that:
A robust zero-trust security program includes phishing-resistant multi factor authentication (MFA), access controls for devices and applications, risk-signalling, dynamic authentication, firewalls, analytics, web monitoring and more. As I said previously there is no one answer to zero trust, or indeed the TSA, but getting the basics right like strong MFA, single sign on (SSO) and device trust are an easy and effective way to get started.
The TSA will be a huge undertaking for industry, but it is important to focus on the benefits such a wide-reaching set of regulatory rules will inevitably result in. As another guest from our recent event put it: ‘the TSA is full of the latest and modern best practice around security, so the aim really is to raise the tide and all ships, which can only be a good thing.’
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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In November 2020, the Telecommunications (Security) Bill was formally introduced to the UK’s House of Commons by the department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. Now, after several readings, debates, committee hearings, and periods of consultation, the Telecommunications (Security) Act is quickly becoming reality for providers of public telecoms networks and services in the UK, going live on 1 October 2022. Here, we outline what exactly the requirements mean for these firms, and what they can do to prepare.
The Act outlines new legal duties on telecoms firms to increase the security of the entire UK network and introduces new regulatory powers to the UK Telecoms regulator OFCOM to regulate Public Telecommunications Providers in the area of cyber security. It place obligations on operators to put in place more measures around the security of their supply chains, which includes the security of the products they procure. The Act grants powers to the Secretary of State to introduce a so-called Code of Practice. It is this Code of Practice which contains the bulk of the technical requirements that operators must comply with. Those not in compliance face large fines (up to 10% of company turnover for one year).
Following the UK Telecoms Supply Chain review in 2018, the government identified three areas of concern that needed addressing:
Following the review, little did we know a major resilience test for the telecoms industry was about to face significant challenges brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Data released by Openreach – the UK’s largest broadband network, used by customers of BT, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and Zen – showed that broadband usage more than doubled in 2020 with 50,000 Petabytes (PB) of data being consumed across the country, compared to around 22,000 in 2019.
There is no question the security resilience of the UK telecoms sector is becoming ever more crucial — especially as the government intends to bring gigabit capable broadband to every home and business across the UK by 2025. As outlined in the National Cyber Security Centre’s Security analysis for the UK telecoms sector, ‘As technologies grow and evolve, we must have a security framework that is fit for purpose and ensures the UK’s Critical National Telecoms Infrastructure remains online and secure both now and in the future’.
The legislation will apply to public telecoms providers (including large companies such as BT and Vodafone and smaller companies that offer telecoms networks or services to the public). More specifically to quote the Act itself:
As the requirements are long and varied and so the timelines to comply have been broken down to help organisations comply. The current Code of Practice expects Tier 1 providers to implement ‘the most straightforward and least resource intensive measures’ by 31 March 2024, and the more complex and resource intensive measures by 31 March 2025.
Tier 2 firms have been given an extra two years on top of the dates outlined above to reflect the relative sizes of providers. Tier 3 providers aren’t in scope of the regulatory changes currently but are strongly encouraged to use the Code of Practice as best practice. The Code of Practice also expects that these firms ‘must continue to take appropriate and proportionate measures to comply with their new duties under the Act and the regulations’.
The TSA introduces a range of new requirements for those in the telecoms industry to understand and follow. These will require a multi-year programme for affected organisations. An area of high focus for example will be on Third Party controls and managing the relationship with them.
However there are more common security requirements as well. From our work with many companies across many different industries, we know that establishing that users accessing corporate systems, data and applications are who they say they are is a key aspect of reducing risk by limiting the possibility of attacks coming in through the front door. This is a very real risk highlighted in Verizon’s 2022 Data Breaches Investigations Report, which states that around 82% of data breaches involved a human element, including incidents in which employees expose information directly or making a mistake that enables cyber criminals to access the organisation’s systems.
Therefore, one area to start to try and protect the organisation and take a step on the way to compliance is to build up authentication and secure access to systems, data and applications. However even this can take time to implement over large complex environments. It means gaining an understanding of all devices and ensuring there is a solid profile around them, so they can be reported on, attacks can be blocked and prevented, and access to applications can be controlled as needed.
We will be creating more information around the Act as we move closer to the deadlines, including part two of this blog where we will take a deeper dive into themes introduced by the bill, how it compare with other industries’ and jurisdictions’ cyber security initiatives, and explore what else the telecoms industry can do to improve its security posture.
We are also running an event in London on 13 October: ‘Are you ready for TSA?’ which will include peer discussions where participation is welcome on the TSA. If you are interested in attending, please register here.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
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