The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened a rulemaking in September asking whether platforms should be required to stop impersonation scam ads from reaching consumers, citing ad tools that generate copy, images and video and optimize targeting regardless of whether an ad is legitimate. The article reports that nearly one trillion scam …
Proofpoint reported at its Protect 2026 conference that generative AI is removing the behavioral tells (awkward language, reused templates, repeated infrastructure) that email filters have relied on. Attackers can now produce fluent, personalized, unique messages for each recipient, which weakens behavior-only detection. The vendor cites …
Russian firm Solar (a Rostelecom subsidiary) reported a nearly two-year intrusion at an unnamed Russian healthcare organization, attributed to the Belarus-aligned hacktivist cluster Partisan Zmiy (Cyber Partisans). Solar found the compromise in December 2025, but the earliest signs date to early 2024. Unlike the group's usual destructive …
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 …
Zscaler ThreatLabz's 2026 Ransomware Report describes ransomware operators using generative AI to sharpen phishing, speed up reconnaissance and pick out the most sensitive corporate data to steal. The report records 896.2 TB exfiltrated by the top 10 ransomware groups between April 2025 and March 2026. The article cites a 275.8% annual in…
A Cisco blog post by Renato Morais compares past landmark threats with the emerging risk from autonomous AI agents, then presents Cisco's agentic security reference architecture. It recounts the ILOVEYOU worm (2000), a social-engineering email worm, and WannaCry (2017), a ransomware worm using EternalBlue against unpatched Windows systems…
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 …
FortiGuard Labs describes a large-scale, global campaign that uses heavily obfuscated JScript droppers to launch an AutoIt/Lua-based loader with low detection rates. The loader delivers several popular RATs and infostealers, including a version of Snake Keylogger. The infection chain relies on business email compromise tactics, impersonat…
ESET analysis describes a two-pronged risk for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs): AI agents create new paths into business systems, while attackers use AI to add speed and scale to established threats. Between March and May 2026, ESET scanned almost 900,000 unique agent skills from popular repositories and found more than 25,000 suspic…
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 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…
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…
The Security Affairs Malware Newsletter Round 119 is a weekly digest of malware research published by Pierluigi Paganini. It lists reports on IronChain ransomware, the evolution of XWorm from infostealer to surveillance platform, and the Hirudo banking malware spread through fake updates and patched banking apps. It also covers PEERSTITCH…
This weekly roundup covers a cluster of breaches, critical vulnerabilities and law-enforcement actions. Bluesky confirmed more than 4,500 accounts compromised in a phishing campaign using a fake government payment offer. Zeabur will shut down after a second breach this year that exposed over 3.2 million environment variable records and da…
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…
Huntress published an explainer on business email compromise (BEC), a targeted form of phishing in which attackers impersonate or take over trusted email accounts to redirect payments or steal credentials. The article cites roughly $55 billion in worldwide losses and a Huntress survey of 500+ US IT professionals, in which 36% of organizat…
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…
Cisco Talos disclosed an APT spear-phishing and quishing campaign, tracked as UAT-11985, that targets individuals affiliated with Taiwan research organizations. First seen in mid-2026, it uses fake event invitations to lead victims to an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing framework that harvests Google account credentials and MFA cod…
This weekly recap covers several concurrent incidents. ConnectWise disabled seven application identities and suspended Cloud Backup after unknown actors abused them to compromise Microsoft 365 tenants. China-nexus Armory Castle (UNC5221 / Warp Panda) exploited BeyondTrust Remote Support flaw CVE-2026-102764 (CVSS 9.3) as a zero-day in lat…