Hackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability in Salesforce’s email services and SMTP servers to launch a sophisticated phishing campaign targeting valuable Facebook accounts.
The attackers chained a flaw dubbed “PhishForce,” to bypass Salesforce’s sender verification safeguards and quirks in Facebook’s web games platform to mass-send phishing emails.
The benefit of using a reputable email gateway like Salesforce to distribute phishing emails is the evasion of secure email gateways and filtering rules, ensuring that the malicious emails reach the target’s inbox.
The Salesforce CRM allows customers to send emails as their own brand using custom domains that the platform must first verify.
Clicking on the embedded button takes the victim to a phishing page hosted and displayed as part of the Facebook gaming platform, which adds further legitimacy to the attack and makes it even harder for the email recipients to realize the fraud.
After confirming the issues by replicating the creation of a Salesforce-branded address capable of disseminating phishing emails, Guardio Labs notified the vendor of their discovery on June 28, 2023.
