All news with #phishing tag

📧 Darktrace detected more than 32 million high-confidence phishing emails in 2025, signaling a major escalation in identity-driven attacks and automated campaigns. Over 8.2 million of those targeted VIPs, while 1.6 million originated from newly created domains and 1.2 million included malicious QR codes. The vendor reported 70% of phishing passed DMARC, 41% were spear-phishing and 38% used novel social-engineering techniques, highlighting attackers’ growing sophistication and emphasis on credential compromise.

🛡️ Cisco Talos reports an active campaign, observed since December 2025, in which actor UAT-10027 deployed a previously undocumented backdoor called Dohdoor that uses DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) for covert C2. The multi-stage chain leverages phishing-delivered PowerShell to fetch a batch dropper that sideloads a disguised DLL into legitimate Windows binaries and tunnels C2 through Cloudflare’s edge. Dohdoor decrypts and reflectively executes payloads in memory, unhooks ntdll to evade EDR, and was observed targeting U.S. education and healthcare organizations.

🔒 Android is expanding its AI-driven Scam Detection protections for calls and messages, bringing on-device Gemini models to more Pixel and Samsung Galaxy devices. A real-world example describes a Pixel user who avoided a convincing bank scam after receiving a timely Scam Detection warning during the call. Google Messages protections now cover 20+ countries and multiple languages and have improved detection for sophisticated threats like job-offer and romance “pig butchering” scams. Processing occurs on-device, data aren’t stored or shared, and the feature is off by default and excluded for contacts.

🔒 The Kaspersky Team outlines evolving variations of the ClickFix social‑engineering technique, where attackers trick users into executing malicious commands on their own machines. Recent campaigns abuse legitimate utilities such as mshta.exe, nslookup and the legacy Finger protocol, and have used platforms like TikTok, Pastebin and fake extension pages to prompt victims to run code. Observed payloads include infostealers and remote access trojans such as ModeloRAT. Organizations are advised to prioritize user awareness and robust endpoint and XDR controls to mitigate these risks.

🔒 Malwarebytes researchers warn of a convincing fake Zoom meeting page that silently downloads and installs a covert build of Teramind on Windows endpoints. Victims see scripted participants and an “Update Available” countdown that triggers a silent download while a fake Microsoft Store screen displays a staged installation. Because the payload is a repackaged commercial monitoring tool, many defenses may not flag it, so prompt verification and training are essential.

📧 A financially motivated threat group dubbed Diesel Vortex has run an extensive phishing campaign since September 2025 targeting freight and logistics operators across the U.S. and Europe, using roughly 52 domains to harvest credentials. Researchers at Have I Been Squatted and partner Ctrl-Alt-Intel discovered exposed repositories and Telegram webhook logs revealing the group's tooling, communications, and an internal mind map describing a call-center style operation. The campaign stole 1,649 unique credential pairs and employed sophisticated evasion — Cyrillic homoglyphs, a nine-stage cloaking chain, voice phishing, Telegram infiltration, and pixel-perfect clones — before coordinated takedowns disrupted the infrastructure.

🛡️ 1Campaign is a cloaking service that helps threat actors run malicious Google Ads by passing automated screening and serving benign pages to security researchers while exposing real users to phishing and crypto-drainer content. According to Varonis, the platform offers a dashboard for targeting by geography, ISP, and device, and assigns fraud risk scores to filter out cloud-based and researcher traffic. It also includes a Google Ads launcher that aids operators in bypassing policy checks and impersonating brands, allowing malicious ads to remain online until manually reported.

🔎 Business Email Compromise (BEC) exploits social engineering and subtle technical deception to manipulate employees and bypass controls. Attackers use domain tweaks, display-name spoofing, urgent off-hours requests, and impersonation to pressure finance, HR, or operations into transfers or data disclosure. Inspect headers and SPF/DKIM/DMARC, enforce MFA, run phishing simulations, and maintain a strict verification culture.

🔒 A sophisticated phishing campaign impersonating cryptocurrency broker Bitpanda has been uncovered by Cofense, employing a near-perfect fake login to steal credentials. Victims are guided through a staged MFA flow that requests names, phone numbers, addresses and dates of birth, enabling account takeover and identity abuse. The fraudulent landing page uses deceptive domains and urgent messaging before redirecting users to the real login page. Users should verify sender addresses, hover over links and access platforms via bookmarks rather than email links.

⚠️ CrowdStrike's Global Threat Report 2026 warns that AI-enabled cyber-attacks rose 89% in 2025 as adversaries used machine learning and LLMs to scale and refine phishing, disinformation and malware operations. Researchers observed LLMs producing multilingual, convincing phishing lures and automating campaign creation, while some actors embedded prompting into malware (eg, LameHug) for reconnaissance. CrowdStrike recommends strong identity controls, AI-focused awareness training and threat-intel monitoring to mitigate the accelerating threat.

🔐 Cybercriminals increasingly employ generative AI to automate and scale established attack techniques, from highly convincing phishing and deepfakes to AI-assisted malware creation and accelerated vulnerability exploitation. Adversaries are building custom LLMs, hijacking cloud LLM resources, and orchestrating multi-agent campaigns that speed reconnaissance and weaponization. Organizations should adopt layered defenses, monitor API and AI usage, tighten identity and access, and leverage AI-based detection to mitigate these evolving threats.

🔍Typosquatting remains a highly effective deception tactic where attackers register look-alike domains to phish, harvest credentials, and deliver malware. CrowdStrike describes how adversaries exploit weak registrar verification and craft convincing WHOIS records while using techniques such as strategic HTTP redirects, geo-targeted content and fake sale pages to evade detection. Organizations should monitor registrations, protect brands, and use Falcon Adversary Intelligence to detect and disrupt campaigns.

🔐 Starkiller is a phishing-as-a-service that dynamically loads live login pages and proxies user interactions through attacker-controlled infrastructure. It generates deceptive URLs that visually mimic legitimate domains (for example using an @-based URL trick), spins up containerized headless browsers, and records every keystroke, session token, and MFA code. The platform streams sessions in real time, harvests cookies and MFA codes, and delivers campaign analytics and Telegram alerts to customers.

⚠️ Proofpoint uncovered TrustConnect, a malware-as-a-service that masquerades as a legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) product and is advertised at about $300 per month. The operation uses a polished public website and a backend portal that functions as a web-based command-and-control dashboard for paying customers. Attackers primarily rely on social engineering — phishing lures and signed installers impersonating Zoom, Teams, Adobe Reader and others — to trick victims into running the RAT, which auto-registers infected hosts in the portal. Researchers disrupted parts of the infrastructure but observed resilient activity and a related variant called DocConnect.

🔒 Elastic Security Labs disclosed a ClickFix campaign that leverages compromised legitimate websites to deliver a new remote access trojan named MIMICRAT. Attackers inject JavaScript to load an externally hosted PHP lure that shows a fake Cloudflare verification page and tricks victims into running a PowerShell command. A multi-stage PowerShell chain performs ETW and AMSI bypasses, then drops a Lua-based in-memory loader which decrypts shellcode to install the RAT. MIMICRAT communicates over HTTPS on port 443 using profiles that mimic web analytics and supports localized lures in 17 languages to widen impact.

🔐 Researchers at KnowBe4 discovered a campaign aimed at North American businesses that tricks employees into entering a “Secure Authorization” code on a legitimate Microsoft 365 login page. Unknown to victims, the code actually authorizes an attacker-controlled device through the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant, issuing access and refresh tokens that grant persistent access to Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and other services. Recommended mitigations include allowlisting OAuth apps, disabling device-code flow in Entra conditional access where feasible, auditing integrations, and ongoing employee awareness training.

🔍 Group-IB uncovered a sophisticated campaign that impersonated Indonesia’s official Coretax service to distribute malicious Android APKs, causing an estimated $1.5m–$2m in losses nationwide. Attackers combined phishing sites, WhatsApp impersonation and vishing to coerce victims into installing RATs such as Gigabud.RAT and MMRat, enabling remote access and unauthorized banking transfers. The operation produced 996 phishing URLs, 228 new malware samples and used infrastructure that impersonated over 16 trusted brands, suggesting a scalable MaaS model.

🔒 A Nigerian national, Matthew Abiodun Akande, was sentenced to eight years in prison after hacking multiple Massachusetts tax preparation firms and filing over 1,000 fraudulent tax returns seeking more than $8.1 million in refunds. Authorities say he stole clients' Social Security numbers and prior-year tax data by deploying the Warzone RAT masked with a crypter, and used convincing CEO-impersonation phishing messages with a Dropbox link to silently install malware. Akande was arrested in October 2024 at London’s Heathrow Airport, extradited to the U.S. in March 2025, and ordered to pay nearly $1.4 million in restitution plus three years of supervised release.

📞 Threat actors are combining device-code phishing and voice-based social engineering to abuse the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization flow and compromise Microsoft Entra accounts. Instead of malicious apps, attackers leverage legitimate Microsoft OAuth client IDs and the standard device login workflow so victims unknowingly produce valid tokens and complete MFA. Security researchers suspect the ShinyHunters extortion group is involved; administrators should audit and revoke suspicious consents, disable the device code flow when not needed, and enforce conditional access policies.

⚠️ Abnormal researchers have identified Starkiller, a commercial-grade phishing kit that proxies live login pages to harvest credentials and session tokens. Unlike static HTML clones, Starkiller runs a headless Chrome proxy that serves genuine page content and forwards one-time codes in real time, enabling MFA bypass. Distributed as a subscription on the dark web with updates and Telegram support, it includes real-time session monitoring, a keylogger and deceptive URLs mimicking major providers. Organizations should monitor anomalous login patterns and session token reuse to reduce risk.