Huntress argues that passkeys raise the bar for authentication but do not close the account lifecycle: attackers still target enrollment, recovery, compromised endpoints, alternative sign-in flows and social engineering. Huntress researchers tracked a device-code phishing campaign, EvilTokens, that hit 344 organizations across five countr…
ESET warns that QR-code phishing ("quishing") is a growing way to slip past corporate email security. According to the ESET Threat Report H1 2026, malicious QR codes were embedded in 11% of all phishing emails in the first half of 2026. The codes hide destination URLs from filters that cannot extract and inspect them, and they move the vi…
This ESET blog post argues that AI is speeding up the threat landscape for SMBs, both by empowering threat actors and by widening the attack surface as businesses adopt AI faster than they govern it. The ESET SMB Cyber Readiness Index 2026 reports that 73% of SMBs are integrating AI, 40% lack a proper AI policy, and 45% suffered a cyberse…
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…
Check Point Exposure Management researchers uncovered a large, multi-region phishing infrastructure that conceals active campaigns behind domains that look inactive. Root domains return blank or generic "Not Found" pages, while the phishing content is served only through concealed regional paths (for example /it, /de, /pa) and under speci…
Episode 488 of the Smashing Security podcast, hosted by Graham Cluley with guest Paul Ducklin, covers several recent security stories. The lead item is the arrest by the FBI of an executive at a ransomware negotiation firm, reportedly at a cybersecurity conference, in connection with the investigation into the ShinyHunters gang. The hosts…
Microsoft, working with industry partners and Japanese police, disrupted a Chinese-language phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) ecosystem centered on Yam Store, an underground marketplace tracked as Storm-3119. The phishing kits sold there were responsible for over a billion phishing emails and texts sent to more than 75,000 organizations since…
Two official Twitter/X accounts of Ireland's police service, Garda Síochána, were accessed by an unauthorised third party on Wednesday evening and used to post cryptocurrency-related messages. The posts claimed followers could claim free cryptocurrency through an airdrop, a lure that can trick victims into handing over wallet keys and hav…
An actor using the handle Shenron claims to have released a dataset tied to APICRYPT Messaging, a secure healthcare messaging system created in 1996 and managed by the APICEM association. The listing advertises 852,757 rows covering 60,911 users, and marks the breach and release as occurring in 2026. The visible sample contains healthcare…
The FBI and CISA issued a joint Public Service Announcement warning that malicious cyber actors may use phishing and smishing against election officials, candidates and political organizations ahead of the 2026 U.S. midterm elections. These targets are attractive because of their access to voter registration data, current government offic…
A threat actor calling itself Siriusim allegedly leaked customer information and documents tied to the State Bank of India (SBI), according to a CyberPulse post dated October 16, 2026. The claimed dataset has 375,000 CSV rows and 2,722 PDF documents. Its authenticity, origin and scope are unverified, and the row count does not equal the n…
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…
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…
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…