COMMON ATTACK PATTERN ENUMERATION AND CLASSIFICATIONLive MITRE record

CAPEC-631

SoundSquatting

An adversary registers a domain name that sounds the same as a trusted domain, but has a different spelling. A SoundSquatting attack takes advantage of a user's confusion of the two words to direct Internet traffic to adversary-controlled destinations. SoundSquatting does not require an attack against the trusted domain or complicated reverse engineering.

Abstraction

Detailed

Typical severity

Medium

Likelihood of attack

Low

Understand the attack

What is this attack pattern?

An adversary registers a domain name that sounds the same as a trusted domain, but has a different spelling. A SoundSquatting attack takes advantage of a user's confusion of the two words to direct Internet traffic to adversary-controlled destinations. SoundSquatting does not require an attack against the trusted domain or complicated reverse engineering.

Execution flow

How does the attack proceed, step by step?

1

Explore

Determine target website

The adversary first determines which website to impersonate, generally one that is trusted, receives a consistent amount of traffic, and is a homophone.

Techniques used

  • Research popular or high traffic websites which are also homophones.
2

Experiment

Impersonate trusted domain

In order to impersonate the trusted domain, the adversary needs to register the SoundSquatted URL.

Techniques used

  • Register the SoundSquatted domain.
3

Exploit

Deceive user into visiting domain

Finally, the adversary needs to deceive a user into visiting the SoundSquatted domain.

Techniques used

  • Execute a phishing attack and send a user an e-mail convincing the user to click on a link leading the user to the SoundSquatted domain.
  • Assume that a user will unintentionally use the homophone in the URL, leading the user to the SoundSquatted domain.

Requirements

What does the attack require?

Prerequisites

  • An adversary requires knowledge of popular or high traffic domains, that could be used to deceive potential targets.

Skills required

  • Low: Adversaries must be able to register DNS hostnames/URL’s.

Resources required

Not stated in the MITRE record.

Impact

What does a successful attack lead to?

Other

Affected scopes: Other

Defence

How is it prevented and mitigated?

1
Authenticate all servers and perform redundant checks when using DNS hostnames.
2
Purchase potential SoundSquatted domains and forward to legitimate domain.

Real world

MITRE example instances

Example instance 1Detail
An adversary sends an email, impersonating the popular banking website guaranteebanking.com, to a user stating that they have just received a new deposit and to click the given link to confirm the deposit. However, the link the in email is guarantybanking.com instead of guaranteebanking.com, which the user clicks without fully reading the link. The user is directed to the adversary's website, which appears as if it is the legitimate guaranteebanking.com login page. The user thinks they are logging into their account, but have actually just given their guaranteebanking.com credentials to the adversary. The adversary can now use the user's legitimate guaranteebanking.com credentials to log into the user's account and steal any money which may be in the account. See also: SoundSquatting vulnerability allows an adversary to impersonate a trusted domain and leverages a user's confusion between the meaning of two words which are pronounced the same into visiting the malicious website to steal user credentials.