Editor’s word: Sophos MDR’s Johua Rawles, Mark Parsons, Jordon Olness, and Colin Cowie contributed to this report.
One of many Web’s most prolific cybercrime-as-a-service operations not too long ago suffered a setback: In November, Sophos MDR observed that detections for the Rockstar2FA “phishing-as-a-service”(PaaS) platform had instantly gone quiet.
Based mostly on telemetry gathered by Sophos MDR, it seems that the group operating the service skilled a minimum of a partial collapse of its infrastructure, with pages related to the service not reachable. This doesn’t seem like due to a takedown motion, however resulting from some technical failure on the backend of the service.
The disappearance of Rockstar2FA, an up to date model of phishing companies referred to as DadSec (beforehand related to Microsoft’s Storm-1575 menace group) got here two weeks earlier than TrustWave revealed analysis detailing the phishing-as-a-service operation. Components of the phishing service’s infrastructure at the moment are not reachable, returning an HTTP 522 response— indicating that they had been minimize off from the Cloudflare content material supply community. Telegram channels related to command and management of the service additionally seem to have gone offline.
Within the weeks following the disruption of Rockstar2FA, we noticed a surge in the usage of the same set of PaaS portals which have been tagged by some researchers as “FlowerStorm”—the identify coming from the usage of plant-related phrases within the HTML web page titles of lots of the phishing pages themselves (“Flower,” “Sprout, “Blossom,” and “Leaf,” for instance). FlowerStorm shares numerous options with Rockstar and with Tycoon, one other Telegram bot-powered PaaS platform.
So, you need to be a rock star
Rockstar2FA is (or maybe was) a PaaS package that mimics reliable credential-request habits of generally used cloud and software-as-a-service platforms. Would-be cybercriminals buy and management phishing campaigns by way of Telegram and are given a novel phishing web page and URL to make use of of their marketing campaign. Visits by way of the hyperlink delivered to the goal delivered the phish; visits to the area of the positioning itself are routed to a “decoy” web page. Rockstar’s decoy pages normally had an automotive theme.
Guests to the URL could be routed to a counterfeit Microsoft login web page. That web page captured credentials and multifactor authentication tokens and despatched them by way of an HTTP POST message to an adversary-controlled “backend server” web page —a PHP web page with a seemingly random quantity for its identify (as proven in Determine 2). These back-end servers had been largely on .ru, .de and .moscow registered domains. The decoy pages had been ceaselessly hosted on the identical hosts because the back-end servers.
Many of the phishing pages had been on domains registered within the .com, .de, .ru. and .moscow top-level domains. At any given time, the Rockstar2FA service used about 2,000 domains throughout these and different TLDs.
Nevertheless, beginning no later than June 2024, a few of these pages used Cloudflare Pages serverless deployment (utilizing the area pages[.]dev), together with code deployed as Cloudflare staff (on the area employee[.]dev), whereas nonetheless counting on backend servers for exfiltrating phishing information. These phishing pages used subdomain names that didn’t seem like created with a site technology algorithm (DGA)—as an alternative, they seem to have been manually typed by the operator of the package. Some had been crafted to emulate particular goal domains (as with 4344655-proofpoint-online-secure.pages[.]dev). However others had been much like keyboard spam:
- whenyoucreatanydominsamedominusedturnslite.pages[.]dev
- pppaaaaulhaaaammmlinnnnbuiiildddeeeerrsssssnzzzzzozzzz.pages[.]dev
These domains made up solely a small variety of the general URLs associated to Rockstar, and had been usually related to the phishing portals themselves.
Technical difficulties
On November 11, the infrastructure of Rockstar2FA instantly was disrupted. Redirects to decoy pages failed, yielding a Cloudflare 522 error, indicating that the server offering the web page was not in communication with Cloudflare.
Determine 5. A failed connection to a decoy web page area
Moreover, the portal pages started to fail. Whereas clicking the Cloudflare “I’m human” take a look at beforehand resulted in a counterfeit Microsoft login portal being loaded, now all that loaded was the animated Outlook emblem. The rest of the script for the portal pages fails as a result of the connection to the back-end server (by way of a POST request) has been severed.
The identical was true for pages[.]dev hosted portal pages, which additionally hung whereas making an attempt to connect with the back-end URLs. Since November, we have now continued to see new phishing portal pages arrange on pages[.]dev subdomains, however all of them fail to connect with their backend servers.
This implies that the operators are persevering with to battle to get their infrastructure again on-line. This can be due to a webhosting drawback or another technical difficulty plaguing the Rockstar2FA operators. The truth that the Telegram bots used to run the service additionally seem like down suggests there may be some bigger type of disruption to the operation.
The rising rock star (?): FlowerStorm
Inside a few week and a half of the interruption of Rockstar, we noticed a surge in exercise from FlowerStorm, although we additionally discovered many of those websites had been being disrupted as properly. The FlowerStorm PaaS platform has been lively since a minimum of June of 2024.
Trying on the habits of FlowerStorm samples, we discovered that the portal used the identical URL to ship an authentication request for the goal as utilized in communication requests to the “backend portal”—on this case, to a backend server using the file “subsequent.php”.
On this case, the identical IP tackle utilized for the credential harvesting was additionally used for the authentication to the person account, primarily based on EntraID sign-in logs.
The phishing pages’ communication to the backend servers PHP file utilized the anticipated fields and communication under:
Discipline Descriptions and Anticipated Values
| Discipline/Occasion | Description | Worth/Instance |
| Do | Specifies the motion being requested. | “examine” – For examine operation “login” – For login occasion |
| CheckVerify | Periodic server examine for authentication technique standing. | – do: “checkVerify”- token: |
| e mail | Consumer’s e mail tackle. | |
| move | Consumer’s password, required when do is “login”. | base64_encoded_password |
| token | JWT containing session info. |
Anticipated Responses and Interpretations
| Motion | Response | Description |
| examine | { “standing”: “success”, “banner”: null, “background”: null, “federationLogin”: “”, “kind”: “workplace” } | Signifies a sound e mail and points a token. |
| login | { “standing”: “confirm”, “message”: “Please confirm your account”, “technique”: “ |
Prompts for MFA utilizing the identical JWT for session monitoring. |
| Methodology | { “standing”: true, “information”: “ |
Posts session-specific information used for MFA. |
| Methodology (Information Decoded) | [ { “authMethodId”: “PhoneAppNotification”, “data”: “PhoneAppNotification”, “isDefault”: true }, { “authMethodId”: “PhoneAppOTP”, “data”: “PhoneAppOTP”, “phoneAppOtpTypes”: [“MicrosoftAuthenticatorBasedTOTP”] } ] | Particulars multi-factor authentication strategies obtainable to the person. |
| CheckVerify (Failure) | { “standing”: false, “message”: “Verification failed”, “token”: “ |
Server begins checking for MFA acceptance. |
| CheckVerify (Success) | { “ |
MFA was accepted, response accommodates session cookies for authentication. |
Not all of the phishing pages make the most of the identical backend server construction. Some portals will make the most of a subsequent.php hosted on the identical area because the phishing touchdown web page. The IP tackle in EntraID authentication logs is not going to be the identical for these portals. For instance, within the case under, the phishing web page protectivewearsupplies[.]doclawfederal[.]com/wQBPg/ sends its publish request to a distinct host with the identical area identify:
![Figure 11: A developer browser view of the phishing page protectivewearsupplies[.]doclawfederal[.]com/wQBPg/](https://news.sophos.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/FlowerstormDeveloperViewPhishportal.png)
Rockstar2FA/ FlowerStorm similarities
FlowerStorm has a big variety of similarities to Rockstar2FA, each within the format of its phishing portal pages and the connection to its backend server .
Doc object mannequin
The HTML of FlowerStorm’s portal pages has modified over the previous six months however nonetheless retains the same Doc Object Mannequin (DOM) content material to that of Rockstar pages. The HTML pages of older and newer FlowerStorm phishing pages, like these of Rockstar2FA, have strings of random, unrelated textual content in HTML feedback, use Cloudflare “turnstile” keys to immediate a examine of the incoming web page request, and produce other comparable buildings and content material, as proven under:
| New FlowerStorm | Outdated Rockstar2FA | Outdated FlowerStorm | |
| Title | OreganoLeaf | Unalike | Elderberry |
| Turnstile Sitekey | 0x4AAAAAAA0_fAGSk-ZDbrja | 0x4AAAAAAAhiG1SBeMjCx4fG | 0x4AAAAAAAceMeRudDiJWXJJ |
| Type Submission Script | FennelBlossom | Nautili | Bravery |
| Feedback Themes | Literary/educational | Automobiles, health, fruits | Automobiles, way of life, fruits |
| Seen Safety Textual content | “Initializing browser safety protocols” | “Working browser verification to guard your security” | “Browser safety verification ongoing in your security” |
The weather within the chart above are known as out within the screenshots under, exhibiting the HTML code of every of the phishing portals. The HTML doc title tags are highlighted with a pink field, feedback are highlighted with orange, turnstyle key with yellow, the script perform identify in inexperienced, and the seen “safety” textual content in blue. All seem to comply with the identical type of template for producing HTML, although the remark and title naming schemes reference completely different textual content arrays.
Whereas abuse of the Cloudflare CDN’s safety turnstyles has been current in different adversary-in-the-middle phishing kits, the construction of FlowerStorm and Rockstar phishing portals suggests a minimum of a typical ancestry.
Credential harvesting
The strategies utilized by FlowerStorm for communication bear shut resemblance to the earlier Rockstar2FA portals, with some minor variation within the area names and responses:
Widespread Fields
| FlowerStorm | Rockstar2FA | Commonality | |
| PHP Communication | Subsequent.php | Each talk to a backend server internet hosting a PHP file. Used for exfiltration and information communication. | |
| E mail Validation | “do”:
“examine” for e mail validation |
“do”: “examine” for e mail validation | Each assist e mail validation as a elementary characteristic. |
| Login Occasion | “do”: “login” for authentication | “do”: “le” for authentication | Each facilitate login operations. |
| Password | “move”: accommodates base64 encoded password | “px”: accommodates plaintext password | Each talk passwords to backend server. |
| Session Monitoring | “token” for session monitoring. | “sec” for session monitoring | Each present session monitoring tokens. |
Area Registration and Discovery
The patterns of area registration and the detection of latest pages by way of URLScan submissions for each phishing kits’ infrastructure seem to comply with a definite sample, particularly when evaluating the area exercise and identification of the 2.
From October 1 to November 11 the peaks and valleys of FlowerStorm and Rockstar Decoy web page detections and area registrations comply with a remarkably comparable development, typically rising and falling in tandem. This habits may point out a shared infrastructure, overlapping operational aims, or coordinated timing between the 2 actions.
After November eleventh, the 2 patterns diverge:
- FlowerStorm begins to point out stronger impartial peaks, particularly round November 22–26
- Rockstar Decoy web page exercise dwindles considerably after November 11, which is consistent with the ceasing of operations beforehand talked about.
FlowerStorm concentrating on
The general nature of FlowerStorm as a paid phishing service signifies that FlowerStorm’s operators don’t select who will get focused for phishing assaults. That’s the choice of their clients. However an evaluation of what actors are doing as soon as they’ve entry to the system might be helpful for defenders.
Based mostly on our detection info for FlowerStorm, the overwhelming majority of the targets chosen by FlowerStorm customers (84%) are in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and Italy. Organizations in the US had been probably the most ceaselessly focused, with over 60% of instances related to organizations primarily positioned inside the US. Canada was the following most focused nation, at solely 8.96%. Total, 94% of the targets of FlowerStorm phishing makes an attempt Sophos has detected had been staff of North American and European organizations. Past these places, Singapore, India, Israel, New Zealand, and the United Arab Emirates make up the remaining 5% of targets.
Essentially the most closely focused sector is the service trade, with explicit concentrate on companies offering engineering, building, actual property, and authorized companies and consulting.
Conclusions
We can not with excessive confidence hyperlink Rockstar2FA and FlowerStorm, apart from to notice that the kits mirror a typical ancestry at a minimal as a result of comparable contents of the kits deployed The same patterns of area registration might be a mirrored image of FlowerStorm and Rockstar working in coordination, although additionally it is doable that these matching patterns had been pushed by market forces greater than the platforms themselves. The diverging exercise post-November 11might mirror:
- A strategic pivot in one of many teams
- A change in personnel impacting operations
- A disruption in shared infrastructure
- A deliberate decoupling of operations to keep away from detection
Moreover, the speedy ramp-up of FlowerStorm has led to some errors and misconfigurations of their operations which have allowed them to additionally simply be disrupted. These errors have additionally offered us with a possibility to extra carefully study their back-end operations—which we are going to proceed to do.
An inventory of indicators of compromise associated to FlowerStorm is accessible on Sophos X-Ops’ Github repository.