Trend Micro published a report, Deepfake it 'til You Make It: A Comprehensive View of the New AI Criminal Toolset, describing how cybercriminals use inexpensive, off-the-shelf generative AI platforms to produce deepfake video, audio and images. Many of these platforms are marketed to content creators. Observed abuse includes CEO fraud wit…
A Russian influence operation is reportedly targeting Latin America, with schools in Peru and Ecuador among the targets. According to Dark Reading, the operation used AI to support its activity. Its tactics included spoofed emails, fake government documents, and the creation of a local organization to give the campaign a domestic presence…
Trend Micro published research (Unmasking Task Scams) on task scams, a fast-growing fraud model in which fake online job offers lure victims into repetitive, gamified digital tasks and then extract funds through escalating deposit demands. Operators impersonate legitimate staffing firms and digital marketing agencies and use SMS, WhatsApp…
Scammers continue to exploit Bitcoin/crypto ATMs as an irreversible payment channel in impersonation fraud. According to the FBI, 13,460 such complaints in 2025 resulted in $389 million in losses, a 23% rise in volume and 58% rise in losses over 2024. Victims over 50 lost more than $302M, and those over 60 accounted for $257.4M. The scam …
Malone Lam, a 22-year-old Singaporean who used the aliases "Anne Hathaway", "$$$" and "King Greavy", has pleaded guilty to leading a group that stole more than US $245 million in cryptocurrency from victims across the United States. According to the US Department of Justice, the group operated from October 2023 to May 2025 and recruited a…
Campaigns that impersonate popular AI brands, notably Claude and ChatGPT, are on the rise. They typically use ClickFix-like social engineering tactics to target unsuspecting enterprise employees, with developers described as being at particular risk. The article, available only as a short excerpt, gives no details on payloads, infrastruct…
Flare research, published as sponsored content, describes how underground forums package services that defeat Know Your Client (KYC) identity checks. Offerings include forged identity and financial documents, manipulated photos and AI-generated videos, live deepfake tools, and accounts advertised as already verified. The article cites the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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 …
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…
This SentinelOne weekly roundup covers law enforcement wins and two major breaches. A federal court sentenced former U.S. Army soldier Cameron John Wagenius to 70 months for attacks on technology and telecom firms, and former U.S. Air Force members Chijioke Timothy Odimegwu and Harafat Mogaji received a combined 189 months for business em…
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…
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…
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…
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…