All news with #business email compromise tag

Polymorphic AI Malware: Hype vs. Practical Reality Today

🧠 Polymorphic AI malware is more hype than breakthrough: attackers are experimenting with LLMs, but practical advantages over traditional polymorphic techniques remain limited. AI mainly accelerates tasks—debugging, translating samples, generating boilerplate, and crafting convincing phishing lures—reducing the skill barrier and increasing campaign tempo. Many AI-assisted variants are unstable or detectable in practice; defenders should focus on behavioral detection, identity protections, and response automation rather than fearing instant, reliable self‑rewriting malware.

40,000 Phishing Emails Masquerade as E‑Signing Services

📧Attackers impersonating file-sharing and e-signature platforms sent over 40,000 finance-themed phishing emails, researchers at Check Point report. These messages mimicked notifications from services like SharePoint and popular e-signing vendors to coax recipients into clicking links or entering credentials. The campaign targeted finance workflows and aimed to harvest credentials or deliver follow-on malware, underscoring the need for robust email security and user vigilance.

Whaling attacks against executives: risks and mitigation

🎯 Whaling attacks are highly targeted social engineering campaigns aimed at senior executives that combine reconnaissance, spoofing, and urgency to trick leaders into divulging credentials, approving transfers, or executing malware-laden actions. Threat actors exploit executives’ visibility, limited time, and privileged access, and increasingly leverage generative AI and deepfakes to scale and refine impersonations. Key defenses include personalised executive simulations, strict multi-party approval flows for high-value transfers, AI-enhanced email filtering, deepfake detection, and a Zero Trust approach to access.

Momberger Alerts Customers of Fraudulent Invoice Emails

🔔 Momberger – Lack & Technik warns customers of a targeted email fraud campaign that began on December 1. The company says unauthorized access to an email account was used to send forged messages requesting payment of fictitious invoices; only existing customer addresses were targeted. Momberger urges recipients not to pay, open links, or attachments, and says systems have been secured while additional protections and authorities are involved.

AI Phishing Factories: Tools Fueling Modern BEC Attacks

🔒 Today's low-cost AI services have industrialized cybercrime, enabling novice actors to produce highly convincing BEC and phishing content at scale. Tools such as WormGPT, FraudGPT, and SpamGPT remove traditional barriers by generating personalized messages, exploit code, and automated delivery that evade static filters. Defensive detection alone is insufficient when signatures continually mutate; organizations must protect identity and neutralize credential exposure. Join the webinar to learn targeted signatures and access-point controls to stop attacks even after a click.

Oversharing Risks: Employees Posting Too Much Online

🔒 Professionals routinely share work-related details on platforms such as LinkedIn, GitHub and consumer networks like Instagram and X, creating a public intelligence trove that attackers readily exploit. Job titles, project names, vendor relationships, commit metadata and travel plans are commonly weaponised into spearphishing, BEC and deepfake-enabled schemes. Organisations should emphasise security awareness, implement clear social media policies, enforce MFA and password managers, actively monitor public accounts and run red-team exercises to validate controls.

Bloody Wolf Expands Java-Based NetSupport Campaign Regionally

🐺 Group-IB and Ukuk report that the actor known as Bloody Wolf has conducted spear-phishing campaigns since June 2025 targeting Kyrgyzstan and, by October 2025, expanded into Uzbekistan to deliver NetSupport RAT. Attackers impersonate government ministries using malicious PDFs that host Java Archive (JAR) loaders built for Java 8, instructing victims to install Java so the loader can execute. The loader fetches the NetSupport payload and establishes persistence via scheduled tasks, registry entries, and a startup batch script in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup.

AI Risk Guide: Assessing GenAI, Vendors and Threats

⚠️ This guide outlines the principal risks generative AI (GenAI) poses to organizations, categorizing concerns into internal projects, third‑party solutions and malicious external use. It urges inventories of AI use, application of risk and deployment frameworks (including ISO, NIST and emerging EU standards), and continuous vendor due diligence. Practical steps include governance, scoring, staff training, basic cyber hygiene and incident readiness to protect data and trust.

Social Engineering: How Attackers Exploit Human Weakness

🧠 Social engineering exploits human psychology to bypass technical and physical safeguards, using impersonation, deception and manipulation to gain access to systems, facilities or data. Attackers commonly use phishing, vishing, smishing, pretexting, baiting and tailgating after extensive reconnaissance to craft believable lures. High-value targets are often pursued via spear-phishing or BEC schemes, while opportunistic attackers rely on mass phishing. Practical defenses include ongoing security awareness training, verified procedures for urgent requests and realistic simulation tests; tools such as Social-Engineer Toolkit help organizations test their resilience.

China-aligned UTA0388 leverages AI in GOVERSHELL attacks

📧 Volexity has linked a series of spear-phishing campaigns from June to August 2025 to a China-aligned actor tracked as UTA0388. The group used tailored, rapport-building messages impersonating senior researchers and delivered archive files that contained a benign-looking executable alongside a hidden malicious DLL loaded via search order hijacking. The distributed malware family, labeled GOVERSHELL, evolved through five variants capable of remote command execution, data collection and persistence, shifting communications from simple shells to encrypted WebSocket and HTTPS channels. Linguistic oddities, mixed-language messages and bizarre file inclusions led researchers to conclude LLMs likely assisted in crafting emails and possibly code.

Phishing Campaign Uses Meta Business Suite to Target SMBs

📨 Check Point email security researchers uncovered a large-scale phishing campaign that abuses Meta's Business Suite and the facebookmail.com delivery domain to send convincing fake notifications. Attackers craft messages that appear to originate from Meta, allowing them to bypass many traditional security filters and increase the likelihood of SMBs across the U.S. and internationally engaging with malicious links or credential-stealing pages. Organizations should strengthen email defenses, monitor suspicious Business Suite activity, and educate staff to reduce exposure.

ThreatsDay Bulletin: Cybercrime Trends and Major Incidents

🛡️ This bulletin catalogues a broad set of 2025 incidents showing cybercrime’s increasing real-world impacts. Microsoft patched three Windows GDI flaws (CVE-2025-30388, CVE-2025-53766, CVE-2025-47984) rooted in gdiplus.dll and gdi32full.dll, while Check Point warned partial fixes can leave data leaks lingering. Threat actors expanded toolsets and infrastructure — from RondoDox’s new exploits and TruffleNet’s AWS abuse to FIN7’s SSH backdoor and sophisticated phishing campaigns — and law enforcement action ranged from large fraud takedowns to prison sentences and cross-border crackdowns.

Cybercriminals Exploit RMM Tools to Steal Truck Cargo

🚚 Proofpoint warns that cybercriminals are increasingly deploying legitimate remote monitoring and management tools to compromise trucking and logistics firms, enabling cargo theft and financial gain. Working with organized crime, they target asset-based carriers, brokers and integrated providers—especially food and beverage shipments—using compromised emails, fraudulent load-board listings and booby-trapped MSI/EXE installers to deliver ScreenConnect, SimpleHelp and other RMMs. Once inside, attackers conduct reconnaissance, harvest credentials with tools like WebBrowserPassView, delete bookings, block dispatcher alerts and reassign loads to facilitate physical theft, often selling stolen cargo online or overseas.

Large-Scale AWS Credential Abuse and SES Exploitation

🔐 Identity compromise is driving large-scale AWS abuse, with attackers leveraging stolen access keys to test accounts and weaponize Amazon SES for Business Email Compromise and invoice fraud. FortiGuard Labs attributes the reconnaissance layer to a campaign named TruffleNet that uses TruffleHog and automated AWS CLI/Boto3 requests to validate credentials and probe SES quotas. Fortinet recommends continuous monitoring, least-privilege access, MFA, and integrated detection via FortiCNAPP and related controls to detect and block these activities.

Email and Remote Access Drive 90% of Cyber Claims in 2024

📧 At-Bay's 2025 InsurSec analysis finds email and remote access were central to 90% of cyber insurance claims in 2024. Email accounted for 43% of incidents and fraud schemes commonly begin with credential theft, domain spoofing, and impersonation. Google Workspace was cited as the most secure mail provider, though claims rose; MDR services were highlighted as the most reliable defense against full encryption.

Identity Crisis at the Perimeter: AI-Driven Impersonation

🛡️ Organizations face an identity crisis as generative AI and vast troves of breached personal data enable realistic digital doppelgangers. Attackers now automate hyper-personalized phishing, smishing and vishing, clone voices, and run coordinated multi-channel campaigns that reference real colleagues and recent projects. The article urges a shift to “never trust, always verify,” with radical visibility, rapid detection and phishing-resistant authentication such as FIDO2. It also warns of emerging agentic AI and recommends strict least-privilege controls plus continuous red-teaming.

MuddyWater Exploits Compromised Mailboxes in Global Phishing

🔒 Researchers have uncovered a global phishing campaign that used compromised mailboxes to deliver malicious Microsoft Word attachments, attributed with high confidence to the Iran-linked actor MuddyWater by Group-IB. The operation abused a NordVPN-accessed mailbox to send trusted-looking messages that prompted users to enable macros, which then installed the Phoenix v4 backdoor. Investigators also found RMM tools (PDQ, Action1, ScreenConnect) and a Chromium_Stealer credential stealer, while infrastructure traced to the domain screenai[.]online and an IP tied to NameCheap-hosted services.

Reducing Abuse of Microsoft 365 Exchange Online Direct Send

🛡️ Cisco Talos warns that Microsoft 365 Exchange Online’s Direct Send feature, intended for legacy devices and line‑of‑business appliances, is being abused to bypass standard authentication and content inspection. Attackers are leveraging these unauthenticated SMTP flows in phishing and BEC campaigns by impersonating internal users and embedding obfuscated lures such as QR codes and empty‑body messages. Talos recommends a phased approach — inventorying dependencies, migrating devices to authenticated SMTP or partner connectors, and validating mailflows before enabling RejectDirectSend — to reduce risk without disrupting critical workflows.

Microsoft Tops Brand Phishing Impersonations in Q3 2025

🔍 Cyber criminals continue to favor familiar brands, with Microsoft used in 40% of all brand impersonation attempts in Q3 2025, according to Check Point Research’s Brand Phishing Report. Google represented 9% and Apple 6%, and together these tech giants comprised more than half of brand-related phishing activity. The findings highlight persistent targeting of the technology sector and underscore the need for stronger defenses and user awareness.

Varonis Interceptor: Multimodal AI Email Defense Platform

🛡️ Varonis introduces Interceptor, an AI-native email security solution that combines multimodal AI—visual, linguistic, and behavioral models—to detect advanced phishing, BEC, and social engineering. It augments or replaces API-based filters with a phishing sandbox that pre-analyzes newly registered domains and URLs and a lightweight browser extension for multichannel protection. Integrated with the Varonis Data Security Platform, Interceptor aims to reduce false positives, accelerate detection of zero-hour threats, and stop breaches earlier in the attack chain.