Hazard actors abused an open redirect towards the formal site out of the newest United Kingdom’s Company for Ecosystem, Eating & Outlying Points (DEFRA) so you can direct men and women to bogus OnlyFans online dating sites.
OnlyFans try a material registration solution in which reduced readers rating availableness so you’re able to personal photographs, video, and you can posts out of adult designs, stars, and social networking personalities.
Since it is a commonly used site, as well as the name is recognizable, risk actors have created several phony OnlyFans adult relationships web sites to increase customers or discount mans personal data.
Mistreating open redirect into DEFRA
Within it malicious strategy, hazard actors abused an open reroute at that appeared as if a genuine You.K. government hook however, redirected visitors to the fresh phony OnlyFans dating internet site.
Redirects are legitimate URLs on website web addresses that automatically redirect users from the initial site to another URL, commonly at an external site.
An open redirect can be modified by anyone, allowing threat actors and scammers to create redirects from a legitimate site to any site they want.
This allows threat actors to abuse open redirects and cause legitimate links to appear in search results that send visitors to websites under their control to display phishing forms or deliver malware.
The malicious campaign abusing the open redirect on DEFRA's river conditions site was discovered last week by analysts at Pen Test Partners, who shared their findings with BleepingComputer.
"On Tuesday afternoon, one of my colleagues Adam Bromiley noticed an open redirect on the UK's Environment Agency web site kissbrides.com read more. It popped up during a Google search whilst he was looking for SoC (hardware System on Chip) datasheets!," explained the report by Pen Test Partners.
These redirects were listed as Google search results promoting porn and adult site likely after being added to websites that were then indexed by Google's indexing bots.
Google search results with redirects to fake OnlyFans sitesSource: Pen Test Partners
As you can see from the network requests monitored by Fiddler, clicking on the 'riverconditions.environment-agency.gov.uk/relatedlink.html' link led the visitors through a series of redirects that ultimately landed them on various fake adult sites, such as 'kap5vo.cyou', ' and more.
Bogus OnlyFans adult dating sites abuse United kingdom Ecosystem Institution open reroute
The redirection process leads to impressivedate, an OnlyFans cloneSource: Pen Test Partners
For example, when the rvzqo.impresivedate[.]com site is first opened, it displays a large animated OnlyFans logo, followed by the following fake dating site.
Fake OnlyFans dating siteSource: BleepingComputer
These fake OnlyFans sites prompt the user to answer a series of questions regarding the type of "date" they are looking for and ultimately redirect them once again to adult "cheating" sites.
While most '.gov.uk' sites accept security reports via HackerOne, the Environment Agency is not part of the program. Therefore, there was a 24-hour delay between finding the open redirect and reporting it to the right person at Defra.
The abused DEFRA domain at "riverconditions.environment-agency.gov.uk" was taken offline, and its DNS records were removed approximately 48 hours after Pen Test Partners submitted their report. Unfortunately, the website is still unreachable at the time of writing this.
At the same time, a second researcher noticed the same issue via Google Search results and publicly disclosed the issue on Twitter.
BleepingComputer contacted DEFRA about the redirect attack and was told that the agency was aware of the technical issues and moved the content to a new location that can still be accessed.
"We are aware of the technical issues with the River Thames conditions website. Our teams have worked quickly to move the content to a new site which the public can now easily access," a U.K. Environment Agency spokesperson told BleepingComputer.
In 2020, a malicious SEO campaign abused an open redirect on numerous U.S. government websites, such as , to redirect visitors to porn sites.
Another malicious campaign that year abused an open redirect onto redirect visitors to COVID-19 phishing sites that spread malware.
More recently, we reported on attackers exploiting open redirects on the Snapchat and American Express sites to lead visitors to Microsoft 365 phishing sites.