Phishing Technique

Phishing Technique

Goal: design, configure, and operate phishing infrastructure that models real adversary tradecraft while staying inside written rules of engagement.

When this technique applies

• Engagement authorizes phishing or social engineering.
• Need to set up GoPhish, Evilginx (v3.x), Muraena, or Modlishka.
• Need domain reconnaissance for lookalike domains.
• Need to configure email authentication for deliverability.
• Need MFA/session interception via AitM proxy, device code flow abuse, or Browser-in-the-Browser when explicitly authorized.

Boundary

• Pretext design and awareness training: social-engineering-technique.
• Payload generation: offensive-coding/shellcode-dev/, offensive-tools/exploits/metasploit/.
• Post-exploitation: post-exploit-technique.

Authorization gate

Before generating any live-target infrastructure configuration, confirm:

1. Engagement ID and signed ROE.
2. Target scope (domains, IP ranges, user populations).
3. Authorized techniques (credential harvesting? MFA relay? session token capture?).
4. Infrastructure ownership (domains registered by/for client?).
5. Blue team notification status (blind or announced?).
6. Data handling (retention and destruction policy for captured credentials).

If any are missing, produce configuration as lab reference only.

Initial triage

Before building infrastructure, classify the engagement objective and the minimum campaign design needed to test it safely.

• Starting state: is the goal credential capture, MFA/session interception, awareness measurement, or delivery of a broader social-engineering scenario?
• First questions: what techniques are authorized, what population is in scope, what level of realism is required, and what evidence is needed for success?
• Immediate actions: validate ROE, choose campaign type, decide whether lookalike domains, mail delivery, or AitM infrastructure are actually required, then build only that slice.
• Tool-family direction: use reconnaissance and deliverability support first (dnstwist, mail-auth workflows), gophish for managed campaigns, and evilginx (v3.x) or muraena only when session interception is explicitly in scope. Real-world PhaaS kits (Tycoon2FA, Mamba2FA, Sneaky2FA, EvilProxy) inform threat modelling; they are not authorized offensive tooling.
• Escalation rule: start with the least invasive infrastructure that can answer the assessment question.

Methodology

1. Domain reconnaissance with dnstwist

# Generate all permutations and resolve
dnstwist --registered example.com

# Show only live domains with MX records
dnstwist --registered --mxcheck example.com

# Homoglyph-only (Unicode lookalikes)
dnstwist --registered --homoglyphs example.com

# Broad scan with GeoIP and banner grabbing
dnstwist --registered --geoip --banners example.com

Focus on: registered domains with A records that also have MX records. Flag any that serve content with high ssdeep similarity to the target.

2. GoPhish campaign setup

GoPhish provides campaign management, email delivery, click tracking, and credential capture.

Key configuration steps:

• Configure sending profiles (SMTP relays, API-based senders).
• Design landing pages (clone target login, capture creds, redirect to legitimate site).
• Create email templates (authority/urgency/curiosity triggers).
• Define groups and launch campaign.
• Monitor metrics: open rate, click rate, credential submission rate, reporting rate.

3. Evilginx (v3.x) adversary-in-the-middle

Evilginx proxies the entire authentication flow, capturing credentials and post-MFA session cookies. Upstream repo is still kgretzky/evilginx2 but current major is v3.x and the binary is evilginx. v3.3+ ships an official GoPhish integration (kgretzky/gophish fork).

# DNS: wildcard subdomain -> attacker IP; open 80/443
# TLS: Let's Encrypt handled automatically by Evilginx
# Layout: ./phishlets (YAML) and ./redirectors (HTML lures)
sudo ./evilginx -p ./phishlets -t ./redirectors

Phishlet YAML keys (v1.x format, still current for the community build): proxy_hosts, sub_filters, auth_tokens, credentials, login, landing_path, js_inject, auth_urls. Evilginx Pro 5.0.0 introduces Phishlets 2.0 with a landing_url field and structured request/response transformations.

4. Modern AitM and non-email vectors (2024+ tradecraft)

Covered in depth in references/modern-aitm-tradecraft.md. Load when authorization includes MFA/session interception, OAuth device code abuse, Browser-in-the-Browser, Teams/Slack lateral phishing, quishing, or ClickFix-style paste-and-run lures.

5. Email authentication for deliverability

• SPF: authorize sending IPs in TXT record.
• DKIM: sign emails with domain private key.
• DMARC: set policy (p=none initially, then quarantine/reject).
• Warm up sending IPs gradually.
• Test deliverability against target email gateway before launch.

6. Campaign metrics

Resources

• references/modern-aitm-tradecraft.md — 2024+ tradecraft: AitM PhaaS kit landscape, OAuth device code phishing, BitB, Teams/Slack lateral phishing, quishing, ClickFix.