HTML Styling Flashcards
HTML styling is where code and images are used to style an email. This is used by legitimate emails to provide a more visually attractive design, making the email appear more professional. This is a screenshot of a legitimate email from Amazon, which uses styling to produce a branded and eye-catching email. We can implement logos, hyperlinks, different colored text, buttons, tables, and more. HTML styling is typically observed with credential harvesters, as they are trying to impersonate an organization, and legitimate emails from these senders use branding and email templates to keep everything neat.
HTML Styling
HTML styling is where code and images are used to style an email. This is used by legitimate emails to provide a more visually attractive design, making the email appear more professional. This is a screenshot of a legitimate email from Amazon, which uses styling to produce a branded and eye-catching email. We can implement logos, hyperlinks, different colored text, buttons, tables, and more. HTML styling is typically observed with credential harvesters, as they are trying to impersonate an organization, and legitimate emails from these senders use branding and email templates to keep everything neat.
Below is a screenshot of an Amazon credential harvester email, that is using very similar styling to impersonate the brand, and make it look more legitimate to victims. The styling has a huge impact on how believable emails are, and the one below looks pretty damn good.
HTML Styling Contd
Now let’s take a look at the HTML from the .eml file. We can see on line 146, it tells us that the email is encoded in base64. This is a pretty common practice, especially with legitimate emails, but sometimes emails will be in plaintext and not require decoding.
We can use CyberChef, an online tool by GCHQ, to decode it using the “Base64 Decode” recipe. This will transform the encoded text into plaintext that we can read.
Below is a screenshot of this Amazon credential harvester. In the bottom pane, you can see some of the decoded content. Common HTML tags include:
<a> </a> - Anchor tags allow for items (such as text or buttons) to be hyperlinked to a web resource.
- Table tags can be used for spacing or tables that include text or images. These are typically used to structure an email into different sections.
<b> </b> - Bold tags can allow text to be formatted as bold.
<i> </i> - Italic tags can allow text to be formatted as italic.
<u> </u> - Underline tags can allow text to be underlined.
You can view a long list of HTML tags that can be used here.
HTML Styling contd
