All news with #phishing tag

🔒 Small security teams can harden Google Workspace by enforcing MFA, restricting admin roles, and tightening sharing and OAuth app permissions. The article stresses stronger email defenses — advanced phishing controls, DMARC/DKIM/SPF — and proactive monitoring for account takeovers through alerts and behavioral signals. It argues native controls form a solid foundation but leave gaps, and recommends augmenting them with Material Security for unified visibility and automated remediation.

🚨 Europol has issued a Position Paper warning of a rising wave of caller ID spoofing, where criminals falsify numbers to impersonate banks, government bodies or relatives. The agency estimates global losses around €850m annually and reports spoofing now underpins roughly 64% of phone- and SMS-related fraud. Europol calls for harmonized technical standards, stronger cross-border cooperation and regulatory convergence to make spoofing harder to perpetrate and easier to investigate.

💷 The UK saw a 17% annual rise in consumer fraud cases in H1 2025, with total losses of £629m across 2.1 million incidents, according to UK Finance’s Half Year Fraud Report 2025. Authorized push payment (APP) losses increased 12% despite an 8% decline in APP case numbers, driven largely by investment and romance scams originating on social media. Card-not-present activity pushed card losses to £299m, and criminals are increasingly using social engineering and compromised OTPs to scale attacks.

🔐 Datadog Security Labs has described a new phishing technique called CoPhish that abuses Copilot Studio agents to present fraudulent OAuth consent requests on legitimate Microsoft-hosted demo pages. Attackers can configure an agent’s Login topic to deliver a malicious sign-in button that redirects to a hostile application and exfiltrates session tokens. Microsoft confirmed it will address the underlying causes in a future update and recommends governance and consent hardening to reduce exposure.

⚠️ LastPass customers are being targeted by a phishing campaign that falsely notifies recipients that a family member uploaded a death certificate to request legacy access. Messages spoof the LastPass domain and include a cancellation link that redirects to an attacker-controlled site asking for the master password. Some victims have also received phone calls pressing the same ruse. LastPass warns it never asks for master passwords and has removed the initial phishing site.

🔒 LastPass warns customers of a sophisticated phishing campaign that uses fake inheritance emails claiming a family member uploaded a death certificate to request emergency access to a user's vault. The messages include an agent ID and a link that redirects victims to a fraudulent page on lastpassrecovery[.]com where the victim is prompted to enter their master password. In some incidents attackers also called victims while posing as LastPass staff. The campaign, active since mid‑October and attributed to financially motivated group CryptoChameleon (UNC5356), has expanded to target passkeys as well.

🔎 GTIG describes a targeted campaign by a Vietnam-based cluster tracked as UNC6229 that uses fake job postings on legitimate platforms to socially engineer remote digital advertising workers. Victims are enticed to open password-protected attachments or visit convincing phishing portals that harvest corporate credentials and can bypass MFA. The actors abuse reputable CRM and SaaS services to increase trust, deliver remote access trojans, and ultimately take over high-value advertising and social media accounts for sale or resale.

🚨 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.

🔒 Group-IB links a broad espionage campaign to Iran-aligned MuddyWater that leveraged a compromised email account accessed via NordVPN to send convincing phishing messages. The actor distributed weaponized Microsoft Word documents that coax recipients to enable macros, which execute VBA droppers that write and decode a FakeUpdate loader. FakeUpdate installs an AES-encrypted payload that launches the Phoenix v4 backdoor. Targets exceeded 100 organisations across the MENA region, predominantly diplomatic and government entities.

🕵️ SentinelOne describes a coordinated spear-phishing campaign named PhantomCaptcha that used booby-trapped PDFs and a fake Zoom site to deliver a WebSocket-based remote access trojan (RAT). The October 8, 2025 operation targeted members of humanitarian and government organizations connected to Ukraine, including Red Cross, UNICEF Ukraine, and several regional administrations. Victims were lured to a ClickFix-style fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA that prompted a malicious PowerShell command, which fetched an obfuscated downloader and a second-stage payload. The final WebSocket RAT connects to wss://bsnowcommunications[.]com:80 and enables remote command execution, data exfiltration, and further malware deployment.

🔒 The Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025 warns that cyber threats are accelerating in speed, scale, and sophistication, driven by AI and coordinated, cross-border operations. Attack windows have shrunk—compromises can occur within 48 hours in cloud containers—while AI-powered phishing and credential theft have grown markedly more effective. For CISOs this requires reframing security as a business enabler, prioritizing resilience, automation, and modern identity controls such as phishing-resistant MFA. The Secure Future Initiative provides practitioner-tested patterns to operationalize these priorities.

🛡️Researchers uncovered the 'PhantomCaptcha' phishing campaign that impersonated the Ukrainian President's Office to target humanitarian and government organisations supporting Ukraine relief efforts. Beginning 8 October 2025, malicious PDFs directed recipients to a fake Zoom site and a Cloudflare-like verification page that tricked users into executing PowerShell via a 'Paste and Run' technique. The multi-stage malware included a large obfuscated downloader, a reconnaissance module and a WebSocket-based RAT. SentinelLABS and the Digital Security Lab of Ukraine advise monitoring PowerShell, enforcing execution policies and tracking suspicious WebSocket connections.

🛡️ Meta is rolling out new anti-scam features for Messenger and WhatsApp to help users detect and avoid fraud. Messenger testing includes AI-assisted scam detection that warns about suspicious new contacts and offers options to block, report, or submit messages for review. WhatsApp will display warnings about screen-sharing with unknown callers. These protections are enabled by default.

🔒 Scammers are impersonating Google’s Careers recruiting outreach to trick job seekers into a fake booking flow that ends on a spoofed Google login page, harvesting account credentials and cloud data. Researchers at Sublime Security documented HTML evasion techniques, abused delivery services, dynamic phishing kits and C2 servers. Organizations should enforce strong MFA, monitor anomalous logins, and train employees to treat unsolicited recruiter invitations with skepticism.

📱 The 2025 Verizon Mobile Security Index underscores growing danger as mobile devices account for the majority of global internet traffic and increasingly serve as primary attack surfaces. Check Point highlights the rise of AI-powered threats, persistent phishing, and human error that expand exposure. Organizations must rethink security architectures, strengthen endpoint controls, and adopt AI-aware defenses across apps, devices, and identities to reduce risk.

🔍Unit 42 details the Jingle Thief campaign, a Morocco‑based, financially motivated operation that uses phishing and smishing to harvest Microsoft 365 credentials and abuse cloud services to commit large‑scale gift card fraud. The actors maintain prolonged, stealthy access for reconnaissance across SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange, and rely on internal phishing, inbox rules and rogue device enrollment in Entra ID to persist and issue unauthorized cards. The report (cluster CL‑CRI‑1032) links the activity to Atlas Lion/STORM‑0539 and emphasizes identity‑centric detections and mitigations.

🔒 Meta is rolling out new anti-scam features for WhatsApp and Messenger. On WhatsApp, users will receive warnings when attempting to share their screen with unknown contacts during video calls to help prevent accidental exposure of bank details or verification codes. On Messenger, an opt-in Scam detection setting flags potentially suspicious messages from unknown senders; detection runs on-device to preserve end-to-end encryption unless users choose to submit recent messages for AI review, which removes E2EE. Meta also said it has taken action against thousands of impersonating pages and disrupted millions of accounts tied to organized scam centers.

🛡️ Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has observed the Russian-linked Coldriver group deploying a new, staged malware ecosystem tracked as NoRobot, YesRobot and MaybeRobot. GTIG's October 20, 2025 report shows the campaign replaces the previously disclosed LostKeys strain and begins with a 'ClickFix-style' ColdCopy phishing lure that tricks victims into running a malicious DLL via rundll32.exe. NoRobot functions as a downloader using split-key cryptography and staged payloads; operators briefly used a Python-based backdoor (YesRobot) before switching to a more flexible PowerShell backdoor (MaybeRobot) to reduce detection.

🛡️ 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.

🔍 Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) reports three new malware families — NOROBOT, YESROBOT, and MAYBEROBOT — linked to the Russia-attributed COLDRIVER group following public disclosure of LOSTKEYS. The attacks use ClickFix-style HTML lures and fake CAPTCHA prompts to trick users into running malicious PowerShell via the Windows Run dialog. NOROBOT functions as a loader invoked by rundll32.exe, while YESROBOT acted as a brief HTTPS-based Python backdoor and MAYBEROBOT is a more extensible PowerShell implant targeting high-value victims.