Transform

In phishing operations, effectively altering the HTTP traffic between the victim and the legitimate site is essential for maintaining the authenticity of the phishing site. The Transform section in Muraena’s configuration provides the necessary settings for detailed manipulation of HTTP requests and responses.

This capability ensures that the phishing site not only mirrors the appearance of the genuine site but also replicates its behavior, enhancing the credibility of the phishing campaign.

This section will guide you through the configuration of transformation rules, focusing on the technical aspects of how to intercept and modify traffic. You’ll learn how to encode content, manage MIME types, customize user agents, map subdomains, and transform headers and content, all of which are pivotal in crafting a convincing phishing site.

Settings

base64

By enabling base64 Muraena will try to transform any content, both request and response, that is Base64 encoded. This is useful when the target site uses Base64 encoding for specific data elements, such as tokens or cookies, and you want to ensure that the phishing site can handle these elements correctly.

Parameters

  • enabled (default false): Toggles Base64 encoding for parts of the communication.
  • padding (default ["=", "."]): Specifies the padding characters used in Base64 encoding, which can be adjusted to match the encoding specifications of the target site.

Request

The Request section specifies where the transformation rules should be applied to the requests sent from the phishing server to the legitimate site.

userAgent

You can specify a custom User-Agent string to be used in the requests sent from the phishing server to the legitimate site.

headers

headers defines a list of HTTP headers to be transformed during the request phase. HTTP headers usually contain metadata about the request, and modifying them can help in bypassing certain security controls as well as avoid leaking information about the phishing server. For example, Referer headers can be modified to ensure that the phishing site’s URL is not leaked to the legitimate site.

Commonly headers to transform include:

  • Cookie
  • Referer
  • Origin
  • X-Forwarded-For

customContent

customContent defines a list of content transformation rules to be applied to body.

The rules are defined as a list of pairs, where the first element is the search string and the second element is the replacement string. customContent works by searching for the search string in the response content and replacing it with the replace string.

remove

headers

headers defines a list of HTTP headers to be removed during the request phase. HTTP headers usually contain metadata about the request, and removing them can help in bypassing certain security controls as well as avoid leaking information about the phishing server.

For example, if Muraena is running behind a reverse proxy, you might want to remove the X-Forwarded-For header to avoid leaking the real client’s IP address to the legitimate site. Or if you’re using a custom header to track requests, you might want to remove it to avoid leaking information about the phishing server.

Commonly headers to transform include:

  • X-Forwarded-For

add

headers

headers defines a list of pairs of HTTP headers to be added during the request phase. The first element is the header name and the second element is the header value.

For example, you might want to add a custom header to track requests, or to add a header to bypass security controls on the legitimate site.

[transform.request]
add.headers = [
    {name = "X-Phishing-Header", value = "Phishing"}
]

Response

The Response section specifies where the transformation rules should be applied to the responses sent from the legitimate site to the phishing server.

Transforming the response from the legitimate site is key to maintaining the phishing site’s facade. This includes modifying both HTTP headers and body to ensure they point back to the phishing domain.

skipContentType

Muraena will try to transform any response content. However, certain content-types might not need transformation, either for performance considerations or to maintain functionality (like binary data or certain scripts), see for example the font/* and image/* content types. By specifying skipContentType, you can define a list of MIME types that should not be transformed or encoded, ensuring proper handling of non-text content.

The skipContentType is a list of MIME types that should not be transformed or encoded, ensuring proper handling of non-text content. You could use wildcards to match multiple content types, for example, image/* would match all image types, and font/* would match all font types.

If skipContentType is not specified, Muraena will skip transformation for the following content types:

  • font/*
  • image/*
Example

The following example skips transformation for image/jpeg and all font types.

[transform]
skipContentType = ["image/jpeg", "font/*"]

headers

headers defines a list of HTTP headers to be transformed during the response phase. HTTP headers usually contain metadata about the response, and modifying them can help in bypassing certain security controls as well as avoid leaking information about the legitimate site. For example, Location headers can be modified to ensure that the real site’s URL is changed to the phishing site’s URL.

Commonly headers to transform include:

  • Location
  • WWW-Authenticate
  • Origin
  • Set-Cookie
  • Access-Control-Allow-Origin

customContent

customContent defines a list of content transformation rules to be applied to both response headers and body.

The rules are defined as a list of pairs, where the first element is the search string and the second element is the replacement string. customContent works by searching for the search string in the response content and replacing it with the replace string.

Example

This rule modifies all occurrences of integrity= to integrify= within the response content. Such a modification aids in circumventing the integrity attribute found within <script> tags, which serves to verify the script content’s integrity. By substituting integrity with an alternate attribute, namely integrify, the phishing site is enabled to execute altered scripts unimpeded by integrity verification mechanisms. The browser overlooks the script content’s integrity check in this scenario, as it perceives integrify as an unrelated attribute and consequently disregards it.

[transform.response]

customContent = [
    # search    ->    replace
    ["integrity=", "integrify="]
]

cookie defines a list of cookie transformation rules to be applied to the response cookies.

Parameters
  • sameSite: Sets the cookie’s SameSite attribute to None, Lax, or Strict. If not specified, it is left unchanged.

remove

headers

headers defines a list of HTTP headers to be removed during the response phase. HTTP headers usually contain metadata about the response, and remove them can help in bypassing certain security controls as well as avoid leaking information about the legitimate site. Removing headers can also help weaken security controls on the legitimate site, such as removing Content-Security-Policy headers to allow for more flexible content injection.

Commonly headers to transform include:

  • Content-Security-Policy
  • Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only
  • Report-To
  • X-Content-Type-Options
  • X-Frame-Options
  • Referrer-Policy

add

headers

headers defines a list of pairs of HTTP headers to be added during the response phase. The first element is the header name and the second element is the header value.

For example, you might want to add a custom header to track responses, or to add a header to bypass security controls on the legitimate site.

[transform.request]
add.headers = [
    {name = "X-Phishing-Header", value = "Phishing"}
]

Examples

Basic Transform Example 

[transform]

[transform.request]
headers = [
  "Cookie", 
  "Referer", 
  "Origin", 
  "X-Forwarded-For"
]

[transform.response]
headers = [
  "Location",
  "Origin",
  "Set-Cookie",
  "Access-Control-Allow-Origin",
]

Advanced Transform Example 

[transform]

[transform.base64]
enabled = true

[transform.request]
userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (PhishingBot)"

headers = [
"Cookie",
"Referer",
"Origin",
"X-Forwarded-For"
]

remove.headers = [
  "X-Forwarded-For"
]

add.headers = [
  {name = "X-Phishing-Header", value = "Phishing"}
]

[transform.response]
skipContentType = ["image/jpeg", "font/*", "application/*"]

headers = [
"Location",
"Origin",
"Set-Cookie",
"Access-Control-Allow-Origin",
]

customContent = [
["integrity=", "integrify="]
]

remove = [
  "Content-Security-Policy",
  "Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only",
  "Report-To",
  "X-Content-Type-Options",
  "X-Frame-Options",
  "Referrer-Policy"
]

add = [
  {name = "X-Phishing-Header", value = "Phishing"}
]