Open Nav
Sign Up

Under the hood of a Smishing campaign

Under the hood of a smishing campaign

Dan Shallom

May 7, 2022

Earlier today our OP Innovate research team received yet another Smishing attempt asking them to provide credit card details. 

The SMS looks like a legitimate message from the Israeli post offices and even contains a correctly formatted tracking number:

החבילה שלך: RU0041902037Z‌ מוכן לאיסוף, אנא לחץ על הקישור והשלם את התשלום: https://2u.pw/MT5To

The message requests credit card details in order to pay customs fees associated with a package and enable its delivery – this plays on the victim’s sense of urgency.

The Tiny URL service is legitimate and has been seen in previous phishing campaigns targeting Israelis.

When a victim clicks on the Tiny URL link they are redirected to the following website: https://cobbjones.ca/postal/log/app/

By navigating to the top level of the website, we arrive at the commercial and seemingly legitimate website of a Canadian law firm. The site must have been hacked in order to gain access to the sub folders – we approached the owner and informed them about the unfortunate hijacking of their web resources.

Hacked website

In terms of security, the site suffers from additional misconfigurations. These provide access to server logs and from there we could see the amount of traffic this site received, and of course the clear text credit card details that the victims inserted.

Here are some further insights:

This is how it looks like from an attacker perspective:

  1. The user form:
  2. The visitors logs
  3. The detailed visitors logs – post processing

Here are some of our insights into the attack:

  1. 06-May-2022 10:43:15 first hit – this is most probably the attacker testing their tools
  2. 07-May-2022 10:40:22 last hit; – this is most probably the tiny URL provider responded
  3. The number of SMS sent / received is unknown
  4. 4103 victims who received the SMS opened it, clicked the link and got to the phishing website
  5. 257 victims of them moved forward and provided credit card data:
    1. 164 were legitimate details
      1. 119 Visa card
      2. 45 Mastercard 
  6. As can seen from the chart below, the campaign was most successful during its first 5 hours:

We took the following action with this information:

  1. Reported the attack to the Israeli CERT 
  2. Reported the attack to the Israeli credit cards companies so that they can approach the victims 
  3. Approached the Tiny URL provider who killed the campaign 
  4. Approached the hacked website owner with some recommendations for patching and recovery
  5. Posted this blog and spread the word – if you happen to clicked and provided your card details contact your credit card provider immediately

Have a safe weekend! 

OP Innovate

Resources highlights

New Linux Vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-6018 & CVE-2025-6019) Enable Full Root Access in Seconds

Security researchers have uncovered a critical privilege escalation chain in major Linux distributions that allows any local user with a session (SSH or GUI) to…

Read more >

CVE-2025-6018, CVE-2025-6019

Zero to Hero: How Our Red Team Turned a Sticky Note Into Full Cloud Compromise

“The weakest link in your security chain might be sitting right on your desk.” At OP Innovate, our CREST-certified red team is trained to think…

Read more >

OP Innovate Red Team

One-Third of All Grafana Instances Vulnerable to XSS (CVE-2025-4123)

Over 46,000 internet-facing Grafana servers (≈36 % of those online) are still running versions susceptible to CVE-2025-4123, a high-severity open-redirect that chains into stored cross-site…

Read more >

CVE-2025-4123

New Microsoft Outlook Vulnerability Enables Local Code Execution (CVE-2025-47176)

Published: June 11, 2025 Threat Level: High Affected Product: Microsoft Outlook (Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, Office LTSC 2024) CVSS Score: 7.8 (High) A newly…

Read more >

CVE-2025-47176

How MSSPs Are Turning Penetration Testing Into Recurring Revenue with WASP

When OP Innovate first launched WASP in 2022, we weren’t chasing unicorn status or massive VC rounds. We were focused on fixing a real problem:…

Read more >

CVE-2025-49113: Actively Exploited Critical Vulnerability in Roundcube Webmail

Severity: Critical (CVSS 9.9) Status: Active Exploitation Confirmed On June 1, 2025, Roundcube developers issued critical security updates to patch a newly discovered vulnerability in…

Read more >

CVE-2025-49113.
Under Cyber Attack?

Fill out the form and we will contact you immediately.