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…
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…
The European Commission opened formal proceedings against Booking.com on October 21, 2026, to assess possible breaches of the Digital Services Act (DSA) linked to phishing and fraud on the platform. The investigation follows a preliminary inquiry and covers how the company assesses and mitigates phishing risks, including how reservation a…
Cisco Talos observed roughly 1,400 messages across two callback phishing campaigns that abuse legitimate Dell and Staples order notification pipelines. The attackers inject fraudulent helpline numbers into fields the retailer platforms render in authenticated transactional emails, so the messages pass authentication without spoofed sender…
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…
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…
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…
Flashpoint's first monthly insider threat report, drawn from its Primary Source Collection (PSC), identified 9,787 insider-related posts across 1,216 channels and 1,778 authors in September 2026. Overall volume fell, but threat actors kept recruiting insiders and advertising insider access, mostly to enable fraud. Flashpoint counted 857 u…
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…
Federal investigators examining ShinyHunters have uncovered potential links between the extortion group and executives at two ransomware negotiation firms, according to a KrebsOnSecurity report published on October 19. An executive at an unnamed U.S. consulting firm (reportedly 1,000+ employees) allegedly helped operate the group's extort…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…