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…
A modular phishing campaign targets YouTube creators with personalized sponsorship offers from fake brand representatives. One variant impersonates Hollyland, a maker of wireless video transmission equipment, and also Nike and Spotify. Victims are led through a convincing fake collaboration platform to a bogus "Sign in with Google" page t…
Publicly reported data breaches in the US reached an all-time high last year, with over 3,300 incidents and nearly 280 million victim notices. The Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) reports that over 471 million notices went out in the first half of 2026, but only 24% described the attack vector, the lowest rate it has recorded. The ar…
Check Point Exposure Management reports that fraudulent voter-registration messages and legitimate political outreach are converging ahead of the 2026 US midterms, making it harder for voters to tell real messages from fake ones. Between July and September, election offices in Rhode Island and Washington warned of fake emails and texts as…
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…
Scammers abused a legitimate spend-management platform as part of a fraud operation. They used its notification system to send phishing messages and its open-banking account linking to validate stolen banking credentials. Group-IB documented the activity in a client environment after the platform reported suspicious payment notifications …
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 SentinelOne weekly roundup (Week 41, 2026) covers law enforcement actions, a phishing campaign and an actively exploited vulnerability. The most urgent item is CVE-2026-21589, a critical (CVSS 9.3) unauthenticated arbitrary file access flaw in Atlassian Data Center products. Exploitation attempts began about two hours after a public …
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 published its Holidays, Scams, and AI survey of 6,536 consumers across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan (2,100 in the U.S.), conducted 31 October to 10 November 2025. It shows a gap between scam-spotting confidence and actual exposure: 56% of Americans are very or extremely confid…
ESET's WeLiveSecurity warns that AI and large language models (LLMs) now automate OSINT reconnaissance at machine speed. Profiling that once took a skilled attacker hours or days can be done by low-skill actors, so ordinary internet users are now economically viable fraud targets. Fraudsters can collect public information at scale, includ…
The FBI warns that scammers are likely to exploit the 2026 US Midterm Election to run financial fraud schemes against victims across the United States. The PSA updates alert I-102924-PSA from 29 October 2024. Scammers use candidates' names, images, logos and slogans to solicit fake campaign contributions, sell merchandise that is never de…