Without details it's hard to say. They talk about "phone spear phishing". It's within the realm of that description to say they were hit the same way someone I know recently was - someone called and said "Can you just install Teamviewer on your desktop for me and give access to a logged on session".

Maybe? I imagine a spear fishing attack could entail the target is sent to a false panel to login where it sends a true 2FA request. The target then freely gives this 2FA code to the attacker.

That compromise OTP 2FA, but not U2F 2FA.

It says right there in the linked page that the phishing attack was able to manipulate multiple employees into giving access past their 2FA.

Yeah, that answers 1 of the questions. But we still don't know what type of 2FA was being used, or what technique the attackers used.

I haven't seen a form of phishing that hardware 2FA doesn't stop. Yes, it would have.

Significant forms of phishing are stopped by U2F (as used by Yubikey and others), by crytographically binding your credential to the domain name , and only issuing an approval signature if the site matches. Obviously, this stops credential phishing.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/google-security-keys-neu...

https://medium.com/@antonisikora/how-u2f-security-keys-can-e...

You and zamalek appear to be in agreement.

You're right - I misread the comment. I'd delete my comment if I could.

It does depend on whether the hardware 2FA is U2F (which stops phishing) or OTP[1] (which doesn't).

[1] http://www.tokenguard.com/RSA-SecurID-SID700.asp

The way it is worded can also mean that there were XSS vulnerabilities in the internal tool since they are saying "gained information about how our processes work". I feel like that's a strange and vague thing to say. The right kind of xss vulnerability would enable them to bypass 2fa too, maybe steal backup codes even.

I understood that line as 'saw names, contact detail, positions and permissions of employees'

If there's an XSS attack I don't consider that phishing.

Isn't it both? Phish first user, post to internal tool and xss attack second user.

Yeah I guess you're right, it could be like an exploit chain where 1 link in the chain is phishing to gain access to something and xss is the next link for lateral movement.

But I don't know what "The right kind of xss vulnerability would enable them to bypass 2fa too" means. If the attacker doesn't have 2FA I would think the attacker can't log in, thus meaning the first link of the chain has no purpose.

But I also think XSS in this case is not very likely. From interviews with the attackers it sounds like they're social engineering experts who hang out on social engineering forums, not XSS experts[1][2][3].

[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/07/whos-behind-wednesdays-e...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/technology/twitter-hacker...

[3] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/07/twitter-hacking-for-prof...