All news with #domain impersonation tag

⚠️ LastPass is warning of a phishing campaign that impersonates maintenance notices and urges users to back up their vaults within 24 hours. The messages contain a 'Create Backup Now' button that redirects to a fraudulent site purporting to build an encrypted local backup, where attackers likely try to capture master passwords or hijack accounts. LastPass confirmed it will never ask for master passwords and advised recipients to report suspicious messages to abuse@lastpass.com. The company said the campaign began on January 19 and was timed to exploit a U.S. holiday weekend.

🔒 Brand impersonation—fake websites, domains, emails, ads, and social pages—is an increasingly common tactic used to harvest credentials, steal payments, distribute malware, and defraud customers and partners. Attackers exploit lookalike domains, SEO and paid ads, and phishing messages to lure victims; even imperfect forgeries can inflict financial, operational, and reputational harm. Organisations should monitor clones, maintain a visible trust centre, pursue rapid takedowns, block malicious domains internally, and coordinate legal, IT, and communications teams for fast response.

⚠️ Scammers are targeting LinkedIn with fake comment replies that impersonate the platform and falsely warn users of policy violations or temporary account restrictions. The malicious replies sometimes use LinkedIn’s lnkd.in shortener or obscure .app domains to hide phishing destinations and present convincing link previews. Victims who click are directed to credential-harvesting pages that request identity verification. LinkedIn says it is aware and is taking action; members should report suspicious comments.

💰Fraudulent emails appearing to come from a Grubhub subdomain promised a tenfold bitcoin payout to recipients who transferred funds to a specified wallet, urging action within a 30-minute window. Messages were sent from addresses on b.grubhub.com and in some cases included recipients' names, increasing their apparent legitimacy. Grubhub says it isolated the issue, investigated the incident, and is taking steps to prevent recurrence while technical details remain undisclosed.

📦 Cybercriminals are exploiting the holiday rush, with NordVPN reporting an 86% month-over-month increase in malicious postal service websites. Fraudsters impersonate carriers such as DHL and USPS, using smishing and phishing links to steal data; DHL spoof sites rose 206% while USPS impersonations jumped 850% in one month. Consumers are urged to avoid unsolicited tracking links, verify tracking numbers on official carrier sites or apps, inspect sender details for altered domains, and report suspicious messages to carriers or the FTC.

🔒 Infoblox researchers found that most parked and typosquatting domains now redirect visitors to scams, scareware, or malware without any user click. The redirects are frequently conditional — benign when accessed via a VPN or non‑residential IP, but malicious for residential addresses — and rely on device fingerprinting, geolocation, and chained resells. The study highlights widespread abuse of expired and lookalike domains and the growing role of affiliate networks in distributing harmful traffic.

🔒 ReliaQuest researchers discovered that a group calling itself Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters registered more than 40 fake domains over six months to impersonate Zendesk, host fraudulent login pages, and push malware. Domains such as znedesk.com and vpn-zendesk.com used realistic sign-in screens while other URLs embedded company names to build trust. Attackers also submitted bogus support tickets to real Zendesk portals to trick help-desk staff into surrendering credentials or installing malware. ReliaQuest noted registry patterns tied to NiceNic and Cloudflare-masked nameservers and shared findings with Zendesk.

🔍 Dark Atlas has uncovered a growing cluster of fraudulent domains used by the Chinese-speaking Smishing Triad to impersonate major Egyptian and global service providers, including Fawry, Egypt Post and Careem. Analysts traced malicious infrastructure in AS132203 — linked to Tencent facilities — after examining HTTP headers and running targeted Shodan searches, which revealed additional spoofed pages for brands such as UnionPay and TikTok. The group advertises a configurable smishing kit on Telegram that automates deployment of multilingual phishing templates for delivery, telecom, government and payment services worldwide.

⚠️ Criminal networks are exploiting shortages of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, using AI to generate convincing counterfeit websites, emails and documents that impersonate regulators and health services across Europe. They are hijacking the identities of the NHS, AEMPS, ANSM, BfArM and AIFA to market fake weight-loss products and harvest payments. Check Point Research documents the tactics, scale and public-safety implications of this rapidly evolving scam epidemic.

🔒 Check Point Research reports a significant increase in Black Friday–themed domain registrations, with about 1 in 11 newly registered domains classified as malicious. Brand impersonation is a primary tactic: roughly 1 in 25 new domains referencing marketplaces like Amazon, AliExpress, and Alibaba are flagged. Attackers create convincing fake storefronts that copy logos, layouts, and imagery to harvest credentials and payment data, with recent campaigns impersonating HOKA and AliExpress demonstrating active phishing tied to seasonal promotions.

🔐 Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 identified two interconnected 2025 campaigns that used large-scale brand impersonation to deliver variants of the Gh0st remote access Trojan to Chinese-speaking users globally. The adversary evolved from simple droppers (Campaign Trio, Feb–Mar 2025) to sophisticated, multi-stage MSI-based chains abusing signed binaries, VBScript droppers and public cloud storage (Campaign Chorus, May 2025 onward). The report includes representative IoCs and mitigation guidance for Advanced WildFire, Cortex XDR and allied protections.

💳 A Russian-speaking threat actor has registered more than 4,300 domains since early 2025 to host convincing fake travel and hotel booking pages that harvest payment card data. According to Netcraft researcher Andrew Brandt, the campaign—active since February—uses a customizable phishing kit that serves branded pages for platforms like Booking, Expedia, and Airbnb and supports 43 languages. The kit requires a unique AD_CODE in the URL to render targeted branding (otherwise visitors see a blank page), employs fake Cloudflare-style CAPTCHA, and persists state in a cookie so subsequent pages maintain consistent impersonation. Victims are prompted to pay a deposit; entered card numbers, expiry and CVV are processed in the background while a bogus support chat guides users through a sham 3D Secure step to complete the theft.

🔒 Check Point researchers disclosed four vulnerabilities in Microsoft Teams that let attackers alter message content, spoof senders, and manipulate notifications to impersonate colleagues. The issues were reported in March 2024 and remediated across multiple updates beginning with an August 2024 fix for CVE-2024-38197, followed by patches in September 2024 and October 2025. Exploitable by external guests and internal actors alike, the flaws could trick users into clicking malicious links, sharing sensitive data, or accepting fraudulent calls by making messages and caller notifications appear to originate from trusted executives or coworkers.

🔍 Varonis Threat Labs highlights BiDi Swap, a technique that exploits Unicode bidirectional rendering to make malicious URLs appear legitimate. By mixing Right-to-Left and Left-to-Right scripts, attackers can visually move parameters, paths, or subdomains into the apparent host name to facilitate phishing and spoofing. Browser defenses vary — some highlight domains or flag lookalikes while others leave gaps — so the report urges user caution and vendor improvements.

🚨 Unit 42 attributes a widespread smishing campaign to the Smishing Triad that uses urgent SMS messages and realistic phishing pages to impersonate toll, delivery and other critical services. Since April 2024 the operation has registered and churned over 194,000 malicious domains and 136,900 root domains, leveraging a Hong Kong registrar while primarily hosting on U.S. cloud infrastructure. The campaign appears powered by a large phishing-as-a-service ecosystem and seeks PII, credentials and payment data. Advanced URL Filtering and Advanced DNS Security provide protections; contact Unit 42 Incident Response for urgent help.

🔍 Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a large-scale investment scam that impersonated Singapore’s top officials, including Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and Minister K Shanmugam, to promote a fraudulent forex platform. The campaign used verified Google Ads, hundreds of fake news domains and deepfake videos, funneling victims through multiple redirects to a Mauritius-registered trading site. Group-IB reported advanced evasion techniques and localized targeting to show scam pages only to Singaporean users, pressuring many to invest and then blocking withdrawals.

🔒 LastPass has confirmed it was not breached after detecting a targeted phishing campaign that mimicked its branding. The emails used the subject line "We Have Been Hacked - Update Your LastPass Desktop App to Maintain Vault Security" and came from spoofed senders such as hello@lastpasspulse.blog and hello@lastpassgazette.blog. Links in the messages redirected recipients to phishing sites (lastpassdesktop.com and lastpassgazette.blog), and attackers have also registered lastpassdesktop.app for potential follow-ups. Cloudflare is displaying warnings and LastPass said it is working to have the malicious domains taken down.

🔍 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.

📱 SEKOIA warns that unknown actors have been abusing Milesight industrial cellular routers to send phishing SMS messages across Europe since at least February 2022. The attackers exploited exposed SMS-related APIs — linked to a patched information disclosure flaw (CVE-2023-43261) — to dispatch typosquatted URLs impersonating government platforms, banks, postal and telecom providers. Of roughly 18,000 such routers visible on the public internet, SEKOIA identified about 572 potentially vulnerable devices, roughly half located in Europe. The campaigns used JavaScript-based mobile checks and domains that disabled debugging and logged visitors to a Telegram bot, indicating operational measures to hinder analysis.

🔒 The National Crime Agency and The Law Society have warned that UK house buyers faced average losses of £82,000 from payment diversion fraud over the past year. This form of payment diversion fraud (PDF) — a type of business email compromise — relies on hijacked or spoofed emails and lookalike domains to alter bank transfer instructions. The campaign urges solicitors and conveyancers to tighten checks and advises clients to verify bank details, use strong passwords, avoid public Wi‑Fi and transfer small initial amounts to confirm receipt.