Phishing Campaign that Imitates Legitimate WeTransfer Applications

The Cofense Phishing Defense Center (PDC) has discovered a current phishing attempt that uses bogus websites to impersonate official WeTransfer applications. Threat actors can use this to get around email security gateways (SEG) and trick users into providing their credentials. 

WeTransfer is a file-sharing website that makes it simple for users to share files. Because of the service's popularity, it's possible that consumers may disregard the email's threat level. Threat actors have reimagined this site in order to attract unwary recipients to click on a malicious link that takes them to a phishing website, where they will be asked to pass up their credentials. 

The threat actor instructs the victim to respond to an email that says, "Pending files will be deleted shortly." The timestamps convey a sense of urgency. The malicious URL link that connects to the WeTransfer phishing landing page is hidden below the "Get your files" button. Threat actors provide a list of typical document names to make this appear more authentic. 

Another intriguing aspect is the email address's legitimacy. The threat actors have gone to great lengths to spoof the email address in order to convince recipients that the email came from the correct WeTransfer top-level domain: "@wetransfer.com." The most prevalent tactic used in phishing campaigns to acquire user trust is spoofing the email address. The top-level domain is specified by the Message-ID: @boretvstar[.]com – has nothing to do with WeTransfer. Furthermore, analysts discovered that @boretvstar[.]com is for sale and links to an error page that reads, “This site can't be reached.”

It's evident that the threat actors went to great lengths to resemble the official "WeTransfer" page as closely as possible. However, upon closer examination, the researchers found that Apple and Google logos are missing from the login buttons, and the URL does not match the actual URL. 

When the user clicks the button in the last stage of the attack, they are sent to a false WeTransfer page. To download the shared file, the user must first provide their credentials. The login area on the phishing landing page is prepopulated with the user's email address. The user is displayed a failed login attempt after entering the password, which is a frequent approach used by threat actors. 

In recent weeks, the PDC has seen over 40 identical campaigns reported by well-conditioned users to spot suspicious emails across all of our customers' settings. This phishing campaign is aimed to get around SEGs by impersonating a legitimate file-sharing platform.