F5 Labs' January 2026 AI security roundup covers two attack developments: the Persona Bullying jailbreak and a critical LangChain serialization injection vulnerability (CVE-2025-68664) reachable through prompt injection. Persona Bullying applies human social-engineering tactics such as gaslighting, ridicule and social pressure to LLMs con…
AI voice-cloning scams are now cheap and convincing, and a Hiya report from March says one in four Americans received a deepfake voice call in the past 12 months. A further 24% say they cannot tell a cloned voice from a real one. The article describes virtual kidnapping scams, in which attackers clone a relative's voice from a few seconds…
Scammers continue to exploit Bitcoin/crypto ATMs as an irreversible payment channel in impersonation fraud. According to the FBI, 13,460 such complaints in 2025 resulted in $389 million in losses, a 23% rise in volume and 58% rise in losses over 2024. Victims over 50 lost more than $302M, and those over 60 accounted for $257.4M. The scam …
Scammers are exploiting the annual Medicare Open Enrollment period (October 15 to December 7) as a pretext to impersonate insurers, agencies or Medicare itself. Contact comes by phone, SMS, email, social media and malicious Google ads that lead to spoofed, official-looking websites. Lures include plan changes, card replacement, lower prem…
This ESET WeLiveSecurity article explains email bombing (also called form, list or subscription bombing) and cites a September report of a Virginia woman flooded with hundreds of emails in 24 hours. The flood hid a genuine bank alert about a fraudulent laptop purchase. Attackers use bots to sign a harvested email address up to many legiti…
Around October 5, 2026, an anonymous onion site called The Luna Moth Files claimed to expose internal material from Silent Ransom Group (SRG), also tracked as Luna Moth and UNC3753. The purported archive includes chat exports, a vishing document, screenshots and a purported fake employee résumé. The publisher and the way the archive was o…
Unit 42 Threat Intelligence published its overview of the top five initial access threat vectors observed in September 2026. Adversary activity relied heavily on external edge exploitation and identity compromise, with public-facing infrastructure and legitimate credential abuse as the primary footholds for intrusion campaigns. Social eng…
Malone Lam, a 22-year-old Singaporean who used the aliases "Anne Hathaway", "$$$" and "King Greavy", has pleaded guilty to leading a group that stole more than US $245 million in cryptocurrency from victims across the United States. According to the US Department of Justice, the group operated from October 2023 to May 2025 and recruited a…
Episode 485 of the Smashing Security podcast, hosted by Graham Cluley with guest Lianne Potter, covers several security stories. Researchers who wanted to test LG smart TVs for security risks got around the terms and conditions by setting up the TV while drunk, on the reasoning that they could not be bound by a contract agreed to while in…
Siemens warned customers that attackers are actively exploiting CVE-2026-110936 (CVSS 8.4), a DLL side-loading vulnerability in Siemens Software Center, to distribute malware. The activity is attributed to the Romulus multi-platform ClickFix campaign. Romulus is a server hosting panel identified by Forescout researchers on October 14 that…
Trend Micro published its 2025 security predictions report, The Easy Way In/Out: Securing The Artificial Future, warning that highly customized, AI-powered attacks will supercharge scams, phishing and influence operations in 2025 and beyond. The central prediction is the emergence of malicious "digital twins": breached or leaked PII used …
Trend Micro released its 2026 Consumer Security Predictions Report on December 3, 2025. It warns that scams will reach unprecedented scale as fraudsters combine automation, AI-generated personas, voice cloning and deepfake media with emotional manipulation. The report expects multi-channel scam journeys to become the dominant pattern in 2…
ESET analysis describes how modern phishing and social engineering have shed the classic tells (poor grammar, suspicious URLs, crude login pages) and increasingly target live sessions and authentication tokens rather than passwords. Cybercrime-as-a-service phishing kits and AI tooling lower the cost of tailored, rapport-building lures. Ac…
Check Point Research's Q3 2026 Brand Phishing Report finds Microsoft was the most impersonated brand, at 33% of all attempts (up from 23% in Q2) and roughly four times the share of any other brand. Apple, Google, LinkedIn and Amazon completed the top five, together accounting for more than half of attempts. Dropbox (up ten places to eight…
Unit 42 attributes with high confidence to an Iranian state-aligned actor, tracked as CL-STA-1178, a campaign called Blinder Tunnel. In March 2026 it targeted an individual in Iraq's critical infrastructure sector, after infrastructure staging that began as early as November 2025. The actor impersonated the Dubai Airports IT department an…
Dutch authorities arrested a 24-year-old, reportedly Pepijn van der Stap (alias "Umbreon"), around Sept. 16, 2026 on suspicion of aiding data thefts and extortions by ShinyHunters. Van der Stap was previously convicted in 2023 for data theft and extortion. Days after the arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members escalated, breaching the FBI …
Elastic Security Labs is tracking REF8801, a campaign in which a fake Web3 venture capital accelerator, Apex Accelerator (Apex Foundation), targets cryptocurrency startups and founders with malicious npm packages. The packages, @apexacc/cli and @apexacc/audit, pose as an AI advisor and an MCP-based security scanner, with offers of free Cl…
On October 20, 2026, Google announced new Chrome defenses for users of Safe Browsing Enhanced Protection. They include a warning against ClickFix social engineering, in which suspicious commands copied by the user are scrubbed of personal information and sent to Safe Browsing for analysis (thehackernews.com, gbhackers.com, securityweek.co…
The European Commission has opened a formal investigation under the Digital Services Act (DSA) into Booking.com, a very large online platform with more than 45 million EU users. It will examine whether the company does enough to stop fraudsters from using the platform for fake listings, impersonation fraud, phishing and smishing (theregis…
A ClickFix malvertising campaign uses sponsored Google results for "amazon business" to lure victims to a fake Amazon login page on Google Sites and then to a fake CAPTCHA. The CAPTCHA pastejacks a command into the clipboard that the victim is told to run in the Windows Run box. The command abuses the legacy finger.exe utility to fetch a …