Researchers at Abnormal AI identified a new phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform, Athena StealthRoute, which uses AI tooling to both create and conceal phishing attacks. Linked infrastructure was first seen during an August 2026 phishing campaign. In the six months to October 9, the firm found about 89,700 attack-related messages with t…
A 40-year-old Nigerian national, Chukwuemeka Victor Amachukwu, was sentenced to eight years in prison by a US federal court for a 2019-2023 scheme that combined hacking of US tax preparation businesses, filing of fraudulent tax returns and fake investment fraud. He used identities stolen from victim organizations to file false returns wit…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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 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…
A Salt Security report, State of Agentic AI and API Security 2H 2026, finds that 49.8% of surveyed organisations confirmed or suspected an AI agent took an unintended, unexpected or unauthorised action in the past year. The research combines a survey of 380+ security and technology professionals with Salt Labs production telemetry. Among …
North Korea (DPRK) is running simple reply-baiting phishing attacks against Ukrainian targets. The goal is to gain insight into its own war effort in Ukraine. The article is a short teaser, so it gives no information on the specific actor, targets, infrastructure or tooling. Technical Details - The campaign relies on reply-baiting phishin…
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…
Darktrace researchers documented a new campaign distributing CikaBika Bot, a Rust-based remote access trojan controlled entirely through Discord. The infection chain starts with a disk image named PropositionProjet.img, which contains a French-language decoy PDF and a Windows shortcut disguised as a Word document. A Nim loader extracts th…
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…
Check Point Research reports that commercial antidetect browsers, notably Kameleo, AdsPower and MultiLogin, are widely referenced on Russian-language underground forums and marketplaces. They are used for account takeover, payment card fraud (carding), fraudulent loan applications, ad-revenue fraud, bulk creation of fake accounts and coor…
Rapid7's Q3 2026 threat landscape report finds that high-severity vulnerabilities were exploited an average of three days after disclosure, with 71% exploited within the first seven days. 79% of them are classed as 'holy grail' flaws, meaning remote and needing no credentials or user interaction. Ransomware remains the dominant threat. Th…
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 …
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…
Huntress researchers identified a fake page impersonating the WatchGuard download portal that harvested VPN server addresses, usernames and passwords before offering the legitimate Mobile VPN with SSL installer. The investigation began after suspicious activity involving an administrator at a managed service provider (MSP), who found the …