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ToxicPanda Banking Trojan Matures Into Enterprise Threat

The ToxicPanda Android banking trojan has matured with new features that expand its global reach beyond users' financial apps.

Researchers report that the latest version of the ToxicPanda Android banking trojan includes new capabilities that broaden its global distribution and increase its threat to enterprises, not just individual users' financial applications. The trojan's evolution signals it is operating at a more professional, enterprise-targeting level. The report outlines expanded features and reach rather than a single incident.

Dark Reading · 23d agoMalware

Iranian banks' SSL certificates are being revoked due to OFAC sanctions

OFAC sanctions are reportedly causing Iranian banks' SSL certificates to be revoked, threatening secure HTTPS access to their services.

A Hacker News discussion highlights a report that Iranian banks' SSL/TLS certificates are being revoked as a consequence of OFAC sanctions. Certificate revocation would degrade or break trusted HTTPS connections to affected banking domains for users in Iran. The item is a headline-only discussion post with limited detail on which certificate authorities or banks are affected.

Indonesia Hit by Android Banking App-Cloning Campaign

GoldFactory exploits Android Work Profile to deliver the Gigabud banking trojan to Indonesian users via cloned banking apps, with Mantax and Otax spreading separately.

The GoldFactory threat group is running an app-cloning campaign against Android banking customers in Indonesia, abusing the Android Work Profile feature to deliver its Gigabud trojan. The Mantax and Otax malware families are spreading through separate distribution channels. Abusing Work Profile to install or conceal cloned banking apps is a notable mobile technique, though the article reports no victim counts or loss figures.

Dark Readingupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild 3 sources

A $25 template helped scammers build hundreds of phantom bank domains

Allure Security researchers found 838 live phantom bank sites sharing a $25 template, built to lend credibility to investment and romance scams.

Allure Security researchers discovered roughly 2,200 domains presenting invented banks, of which 1,095 returned working pages and 838 contained a shared phrase. 97% of those retained parts of the $25 Cuex front-end template and 94% ran Laravel, with a misspelled 'Curreny Charts' heading on 90% of sites. The sites presented login pages, session cookies, and anti-forgery tokens consistent with a fraud model where scam contacts direct victims to fake financial portals. A leftover 'Remedy bank' title and form submission to remedycodes[.]site linked some sites to already-flagged fraud infrastructure.

Help Net Security · 27d agoPhishing & fraud

At UBS, AI skills are now a condition for landing a job

UBS will require 2027 graduate and intern applicants in Global Banking to demonstrate AI skills, among the first major banks to do so.

Per the Financial Times, UBS will require candidates for 2027 graduate and internship roles in Global Banking and Markets to show how they use AI to improve outcomes and efficiency, with AI questions included in interviews. The requirement supplements, not replaces, traditional criteria, and Santander is similarly seeking advanced AI users for some trainee programs. Morgan Stanley analysts project more than 200,000 European banking jobs could disappear within five years as routine junior work is automated; UBS is also testing analyst avatars for client presentations.

The Decoder · 9d agoAI industry

Risky Bulletin: Academics find source code overlaps between Geedge and China's Great Firewall

Academics linked Chinese vendor Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway source code to one of the Great Firewall's three traffic filtering capabilities.

US researchers presenting at USENIX Security reconstructed Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway firmware from over 100,000 leaked files, including Git repositories with commit history, and matched its filtering behavior to sections of China's Great Firewall. They found only 1 of 3 characterized DNS injectors matched Geedge code, noted the system relies on memory-unsafe C components and copied third-party code, and said its bugs could aid future circumvention tools. Geedge also exports censorship tools to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The newsletter additionally rounds up multiple breaches.

Risky Business News · 27d agoResearch2

Meme Coin Factories: Uncovering Large-Scale Manipulations on pump.fun

Large-scale pump.fun study of 15 million meme coins identifies five manipulation classes including wash trading and a Market-Manipulation-as-a-Service ecosystem.

Researchers analyzed all 15 million coins launched on pump.fun over the last two years plus large random samples of transaction data, identifying five manipulation classes: wash trading, creator address obfuscation, coordinated sells, copycat coins, and social media manipulation. Strategic actors bypass the platform interface and implement strategies in a highly automated, low-latency way by interacting directly with the blockchain. The study also uncovers Market-Manipulation-as-a-Service (MMaaS) third-party tools that let non-technical users run these manipulations, and proposes mitigations for traders, pump.fun, and regulators.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch

Task-Directed Residual AddUNet:Perfect-Reconstruction Routing for Full-Rate Representations

Paper recasts additive U-Net skip structure as a perfect-reconstruction filter bank and adds full-rate residual routing for task-directed representations.

The work proves a constrained additive U-Net's survivor-skip structure is exactly equivalent to a critically sampled perfect-reconstruction filter bank, and removes complementary-subband restrictions via a full-rate formulation. A Residual Full-Rate PR architecture routes task-irrelevant or redundant structure away from the task pathway while guaranteeing exact reconstruction without invertible operators, a matched synthesis bank, or a learned decoder. On TIMIT, the front-end improves test PER from 28.60±2.09% to 25.76±0.41% with recognizer and training held fixed.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d agoAI research

Financial Stability Board Sounds the Alarm Over Frontier AI Risks

The Financial Stability Board warned G20 banking leaders that frontier AI adoption poses growing cyber and financial stability risks.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) issued a warning to G20 banking leaders about cyber and financial-stability risks stemming from frontier AI. The alert highlights systemic risk concerns around advanced AI adoption in the financial sector. No specific incidents or regulatory actions were announced.

Infosecurity Magazine · 15d agoAI policy

Introducing ChatGPT for Financial Services

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Financial Services, pairing built-in market data with GPT-6 Astra for banking research workflows.

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Financial Services, a tailored ChatGPT Work experience shaped by design partners Morgan Stanley and Evercore, targeting investment banking and equity research. It bundles premium data from Daloopa, PitchBook, LSEG News, and Crunchbase hosted on OpenAI infrastructure with granular citations, optimized MCP connectors for S&P Global and FactSet, and 50+ connectors, plus planned entitlement integrations with S&P Capital IQ, LSEG, MSCI, Dow Jones Factiva, and Moody's. It runs GPT-6 Astra, which OpenAI claims is state of the art in information retrieval, financial reasoning, and artifact generation, and includes enterprise controls such as SAML SSO, SCIM, role-based access, and no default training on firm data.

OpenAI Newsupdated · 6d agofirst · 6d agoAI industry 3 sources

The Fraud Ecosystem: A Transition From Known Marketplaces to a Fragmented Environment

Rapid7 analyzes how fraud marketplaces are fragmenting into specialized shops after larger marketplaces were dismantled, aided by new MITRE F3 framework

Rapid7 reports a shift from large known fraud marketplaces to a fragmented environment of smaller specialized storefronts such as Xleet, Blackpass, Infodig, and Styx, operating across dark web channels, Telegram, and P2P options. These Fraud-as-a-Service shops sell stolen accounts, PII, synthetic identity generation, infrastructure, and money laundering support, supporting schemes like business email compromise. MITRE's Fraud Fighting Framework (F3), introduced in early 2026, aims to help security teams prioritize monitoring of fraud TTPs, particularly account takeover techniques. Fraud damages are anticipated to approach hundreds of billions of USD.

Rapid7 Blog · 5d agoPhishing & fraud

In Other News: InjectEave Attack, SIM Swapper Sentenced, Glasswing Findings Review

SecurityWeek weekly roundup covers exploited WordPress Super Forms flaw CVE-2026-14894, a $10M bounty on an Iranian cyber official, InjectEave attacks, and more.

SecurityWeek's weekly roundup aggregates short items across the threat landscape, including Microsoft's report of invisible Unicode tag characters used in financial phishing lures at up to 2.37 million messages per day, and active exploitation of critical WordPress Super Forms plugin flaw CVE-2026-14894 to deploy PHP webshells. Policy items include a $10 million US bounty for IRGC-CEC Cyber Operations Command lead Amir Yaryab, a 16-month prison sentence for ex-AT&T employee Kenneth Carter over SIM swaps with nearly $600,000 in intended losses, and the US arraignment of Russian Sergei Anatolyevich Filimonov over credential harvesting. Technical items include InjectEave electromagnetic side-channel attacks tested on 11 devices, an FBI warning on OAuth consent phishing, and VulnCheck's finding that only 202 of 26,153 Anthropic Project Glasswing findings were fixed.

SecurityWeek · 5d agoIndustry in the wildCVE-2026-148942

The New Face of Financial Fraud: AI-Powered Brand Abuse

Akamai reports AI-powered brand abuse is driving financial fraud against banks and promotes its Brand Guardian defense.

Akamai describes AI-powered brand abuse as a growing driver of financial fraud against banks. The post outlines the threats and the business impact for financial institutions. It also promotes Akamai Brand Guardian as a mitigation for financial institutions.

Akamai Blog · 22d agoPhishing & fraud

Risky Bulletin: Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras

Slovakia's NBU found an SMS-triggered backdoor in Russian-made NERO R-ONE traffic cameras, pausing a 279-unit deployment.

Slovakia's national security service NBU issued an alert against NERO R-ONE high-speed traffic cameras after finding a backdoor that grants shell and network access via SMS from hardcoded Russian phone numbers. The cameras are a rebranded version of the Russian CORDON PRO.M model by St. Petersburg firm Semicon, purchased via a Cyprus shell company under a €30 million EU-funded project. The report also found SecureBoot disabled, vulnerable web management, and unauthenticated live streams; the Interior Ministry paused deployment of 279 cameras pending independent assessment.

Risky Business News · 28d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Hackers Frequently Target Healthcare and Finance Orgs

A new Huntress survey indicates threat actors frequently target healthcare organizations and banks because of the highly personal data they hold.

Huntress published survey findings indicating that healthcare organizations and banks are frequent targets for threat actors. The piece attributes this to the highly personal information these sectors handle. The article is framed around cyberattack readiness rather than a specific incident.

Huntress · 15d agoIndustry

Risky Bulletin: BEC campaign steals €35 million from French notaries

Hackers stole over €35 million from 500+ French notary offices in a four-year BEC campaign; ANSSI spent two years helping evict the attackers.

A business email compromise campaign breached more than 500 French notary offices — about 7% of all French notaries per the Conseil Supérieur du Notariat — over four years, stealing more than €35 million by phishing initial access and silently modifying wire transfer details. France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI worked for two years behind the scenes to help notaries remove the persistent attackers, who had deep access; officials also feared hackers could issue fake notarized acts such as marriage certificates or forged real estate deals. No forged documents have been found so far, but notaries have added two-factor authentication and in-person requirements for banking details, and banks added extra checks in 2024. The newsletter also notes other incidents, including a $320 million Bitcoin extraction from Blockstream's Liquid Network and a JetBrains Cadence breach via TeamCity servers.

Risky Business News · 10d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

X says attackers are targeting user accounts after the launch of X Money

X is investigating a wave of unsolicited password reset emails targeting users after the X Money payments launch, with no confirmed breaches yet.

Numerous X users reported unsolicited password reset emails following the launch of X Money, the platform's new payments service with accounts held at FDIC-insured Cross River Bank. Product engineer Mridul Singhai said the company found no evidence of successful breaches or mass account takeovers, while the Grok chatbot confirmed attackers are mass-triggering resets using public usernames. Users are being advised to enable two-factor authentication and Password Reset Protect while the investigation continues.

TechCrunch · Security · 15d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

[AINews] GPT-6 Astra: OpenAI’s biggest LLM launch of all time

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, its new flagship model, claiming state-of-the-art computer use, software engineering, math, and cybersecurity capabilities.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra as its new flagship model, describing it as its most intelligent and aligned model with state-of-the-art computer use, software engineering, and math/science capabilities. Pricing is $10/$50 per 1M input/output tokens standard ($20/$100 fast tier), rolling out first to limited organizations, then ChatGPT Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise, the API, and AWS. OpenAI claims 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4, and 100% on ExploitBench. Artificial Analysis scored Astra 67 on the Coding Agent Index and 61 on the Intelligence Index, behind Claude Fable 5.1, and the system card drew attention for reporting decreased chain-of-thought monitorability despite alignment gains.

Latent Space · 12d agoModel release3

Russian suspect in bank account takeovers is extradited to US

Russian web developer Sergei Filimonov was extradited from Georgia to the US to face charges in a multimillion-dollar bank account takeover fraud.

Sergei Anatolyevich Filimonov, 36, appeared in an Atlanta federal court on September 4 and pleaded not guilty to bank fraud, wire fraud, access device fraud, and aggravated identity theft charges. Prosecutors say that from November 2023 to October 2025 his group bought sponsored search-engine links that diverted online banking customers to spoofed login pages, stole their credentials, and initiated unauthorized wire transfers. The FBI linked the scheme to the December 2025 seizure of the domain web3adspanels.org, identifying at least 19 victims, roughly $14.6 million in confirmed losses, and about $28 million in attempted losses.

The Record · 8d agoPolicy & legal

New GPUThor Rowhammer Defeats ECC on NVIDIA RTX A6000 to Gain Host Root Access

University of Toronto researchers present GPUThor, a Rowhammer attack that defeats ECC on NVIDIA RTX A4000-A6000 GDDR6 GPUs and achieves host root access.

GPUThor uses non-uniform hammering to bypass Target Row Refresh and overcome SECDED ECC on NVIDIA Ampere workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory, inducing 72,000 to 377,552 bit flips per gigabyte across RTX A6000, A5000, A4500, and A4000 cards. Triple-bit silent data corruption enables host privilege escalation to root with the IOMMU enabled, reusing GPUBreach page-table corruption techniques, and double-bit DUEs allow escalation when the IOMMU is disabled during a ~10 ms lazy-service window. The attack cut end-to-end escalation time on the A6000 from 21.9 hours to 1.1 minutes. Reported to NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, and AWS on April 29, 2026; findings were embargoed until August 25, 2026, and no CVE identifier was assigned.

The Hacker News · 8d agoResearch1

You've Got a BUD in Me: Authenticated Reads from Per-Block Write Logs

Researchers propose BUD, per-block write-log digests enabling blockchain validators to serve historical membership and exclusion proofs far cheaper than state-wide tries.

The paper introduces Block Update Digests (BUD), which authenticate each block's write log with predecessor pointers, plus a SuperBUD and exponential hierarchy to turn long unchanged intervals into short proofs. Soundness against adversarial provers and up to f Byzantine validators is proven under archive, attestation, and committee evidence assumptions. Benchmarks show a 50x state-size increase raises the base-BUD path only 1.24x versus 3.1x for in-memory and 69.5x for disk-backed Merkle Patricia tries, with read payloads below 800 bytes and p99 warm verification at 146 microseconds.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Sophisticated Cyberattack Exposes Data of 678,000 French Taxpayers

Hackers stole personal and tax data of 678,000 individuals and businesses from France's tax agency DGFiP, prompting a Paris criminal investigation.

France's Directorate-General for Public Finances (DGFiP) confirmed a sophisticated cyberattack exposed data on 678,000 users of the tax system, including income figures, tax rates and family circumstances for individuals and SIREN registration data for businesses. The Paris prosecutor's cybercrime unit opened a probe and referred it to the French anti-fraud office OFAC after a threat actor claimed the breach in late June. Officials stressed the stolen data does not grant access to secure accounts on impots.gouv.fr, and taxpayer notification begins Monday with warnings about identity theft and fraudulent follow-up requests. The incident follows recent breaches at the ANTS documents agency and the INSEE statistics authority.

Security Affairs · Aug 16, 2026Data breach

Hackers Expose Data of 1.2 Million Heights Finance Customers

Heights Finance is notifying over 1.2 million customers that hackers accessed a third-party cloud platform holding contact, bank and government ID data.

Heights Finance, a U.S. consumer lender, discovered unauthorized access on May 7, 2026 to a third-party cloud platform used to store customer data; its internal loan management systems and operations were not affected. Exposed data varies by person and may include contact details, financial and bank account information, government IDs and dates of birth for customers, loan applicants, inquirers, and former borrowers of Curo Management and related brands. The company is offering 24 months of free credit monitoring and identity protection; dark web monitoring found no evidence of publication and no threat actor has claimed responsibility.

Security Affairs · 29d agoData breach in the wild

Tracking Elirks Variants in Japan: Similarities to Previous Attacks

Unit 42 links new Elirks backdoor variants attacking Japanese organizations to 2012 Taiwan attacks, delivered via spear-phishing PDFs exploiting Adobe Flash CVE-2011-0611.

Unit 42 analyzed new Elirks backdoor variants found in an attack on a Japanese business, noting strong similarities to 2012 attacks on Taiwanese ministries. The backdoor retrieves its C2 address from attacker-created accounts on Japanese blog and SNS services. Recent deliveries used an airline e-ticket lure named "E-TKT" with a PDF exploiting Adobe Flash CVE-2011-0611. Shared infrastructure and tactics with the Scarlet Mimic campaign suggest possible ongoing cyber espionage across East Asia.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wildCVE-2011-0611

X Money rollout linked to password-reset attacks

X is investigating bulk unsolicited password-reset emails as its X Money payments service expands, with no confirmed breaches or account takeovers yet.

X users began reporting unexpected password-reset emails and codes on September 1, and product engineer Mridul Singhai said attackers appear to believe newly widespread X Money access makes accounts worth targeting. X says it has found no evidence of any breach or successful account takeover, and completing a reset still requires access to the account's email or phone number. X Money offers eligible US users interest-bearing accounts, a Visa debit card, and P2P payments, with Cross River Bank providing banking infrastructure. Malwarebytes warns the reset flood can serve as cover for phishing and urges reset protection, 2FA, and unique passwords.

Malwarebytes Labs · 12d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Upatre Continued to Evolve with new Anti

Unit 42 analyzes an undocumented Upatre downloader variant with VM detection via process hashing, packed code, disabled Windows defenses and Namecoin .bit C2 domains.

Unit 42 analyzed an Upatre downloader variant compiled in December 2016 that went largely undetected by automated systems, featuring heavy code flow obscuration, on-demand decryption of network communications, and novel virtual machine detection. The sample enumerates running processes, computes CRC32 hashes XORed with a hard-coded key, and sleeps if analysis-related processes such as vmtoolsd.exe or python.exe are found. It masquerades with Google Chrome icons, disables Windows Defender, Firewall and other security services, injects code into msiexec.exe, and resolves .bit Namecoin domains like bookreader[.]bit via hardcoded OpenNIC DNS servers over TCP.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Malware1

Personal, Financial Info Exposed in Revolut Data Breach

Revolut says a scammer using a legitimate government agency email domain obtained affected users' PII, ID copies, selfies and full financial records.

Revolut, a London-based neobank serving over 80 million users in 160 countries, notified affected users that personal and financial data was exposed to a third party posing as a government agency. Exposed data included names, addresses, dates of birth, driver's licenses, passports, verification selfies, IBANs, account statements, withdrawal records and full transaction history including Bitcoin. Revolut blocked the attacker's email and notified the relevant agency, regulators and law enforcement, but did not disclose how many individuals were impacted.

SecurityWeek · 2d agoData breach

Hackers Clone Banking Apps Into Hidden Android Work Profiles to Evade Fraud Detection

GoldFactory-linked Gigabud and Vwork malware clone banking apps into hidden Android work profiles to evade fraud detection across 11+ countries.

Group-IB links Vwork, a modified version of the open-source Shelter app cloner, to the GoldFactory group and its Gigabud Android RAT, which clones victim banking apps into an isolated work profile so fraud sessions look clean to banks. From February through July 2026, researchers observed about 1,469 compromised devices and 1,281 potentially compromised logins in Indonesia, with estimated losses near $960,939. Targets span Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, the Philippines, Thailand, Türkiye, Laos, and a GCC state; delivery uses fake airline, tax, government, and banking apps pushed via phishing sites, messaging apps, and social media.

Cyber Security News · 7d agoMalware in the wild

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: March 10, 2026

Help Net Security's roundup lists open cybersecurity roles at BioNTech, AIG, ServiceNow and others across Europe, the Middle East and Canada.

A job-board roundup of cybersecurity openings including Associate Director Application Security at BioNTech (Germany), CISO at AIG (Israel), Cloud Security Professional at ServiceNow (Italy), and SOC/GRC, analyst, engineer and data governance roles in the UK, UAE, India, Canada and France. Roles span application security, cloud security, SOC operations, compliance and OT environments. Most listings are marked no longer accepting applications.

Help Net Security · 19d agoIndustry

Heterogeneous Cross-Chain Transaction Tracing for Solana Bridges via Candidate-Set Selective Decision

SolTracer traces cross-chain transactions onto Solana bridges, improving open-world association F1 by 20.16% over the strongest baseline for illicit-fund tracing.

The paper formalizes four Solana-bound cross-chain transaction modes and proposes SolTracer, which maps heterogeneous execution semantics into a unified event space and uses candidate-set selective decision-making with abstention when valid targets are absent. In the challenging open-world setting with a 50% TA ratio, SolTracer improves F1 by 20.16% over the strongest baseline. An empirical study of real-world transfers examines count-value divergence across bridge mechanisms, cross-asset shifts, and decoupling between on-chain settlement and explorer visibility.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

White House launches Watershed 250, a six-month Texas pilot using volunteer vendor cyber and AI tools to harden water utility defenses.

The Office of the National Cyber Director and Texas Cyber Command will oversee the six-month Project Watershed 250 pilot to improve water sector cybersecurity through industry-donated red teaming, system hardening and AI tooling. Twelve companies including Microsoft, Fortinet, Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, AWS, Cloudflare, Zscaler, Forescout, Abnormal AI and Dragos participated in the rollout. Officials cited recent attacks including an Iranian-backed campaign against 30 water systems in 12 states and a 2024 incident in Muleshoe, Texas. Some water-security professionals criticized the program as lacking dedicated funding.

CyberScoop · 16d agoPolicy & legal1

Revolut Exposed KYC Data After Fraudulent Government Email Passed Security Checks

Revolut handed over KYC documents, selfies, and Bitcoin transaction histories to attackers after a fraudulent email from a genuine government domain passed authentication checks.

Revolut confirmed on September 12, 2026 that it disclosed sensitive customer KYC data to an unauthorized third party after a fraudulent information request was sent from an email account operating inside a real government agency's domain, carrying valid domain authentication credentials. The exposed data included identity documents (passports, driver's licenses), verification selfies, birth dates, contact details, IBANs, account statements, and full transaction histories including Bitcoin. Revolut discovered the fraud only after independently verifying with the agency, blocked the sender, and notified law enforcement and financial regulators, but did not disclose the number of affected customers or the agency involved. Researcher ZachXBT assessed the operation was targeted at high-net-worth users, useful for fraud, impersonation, or extortion.

Security Affairs · 4d agoData breach

DoppelCart fraud network uses 119,000 fake shops to steal credit cards

DoppelCart, the largest documented fake-shop network, runs 119,000 domains impersonating 44,182 brands to steal payment card details via WebSocket-connected checkout pages.

German cybersecurity startup Nebty discovered DoppelCart, a network of more than 119,000 fake e-commerce domains, mostly in the .SHOP TLD, that harvest payment card details through fraudulent checkout pages. Over 105,000 shops remain active, impersonating 44,182 brands with discounts of up to 65%, and 96% of confirmed shops share identical build files resolving to 27 commerce backends. Checkout code exfiltrates card numbers, expiration dates, CVVs, cardholder names, contact details, and even bank one-time codes to attacker C2 over WebSockets in real time, potentially bypassing bank security controls. The network surpasses BogusBazaar, the previously largest documented fake-shop cluster with 75,000 sites and an estimated 850,000 fraudulent transactions.

BleepingComputer · 8d agoPhishing & fraud

Banks look for fraud signals in customer behavior

ThreatMark's 2026 benchmark finds 55% of banks see social engineering in most fraud, pushing behavioral intelligence and earlier detection during customer sessions.

ThreatMark's Fraud Readiness Benchmark 2026 reports social engineering is involved in most fraud at 55% of surveyed banks, with criminals impersonating trusted people to make customers authorize payments using legitimate credentials. The report highlights behavioral intelligence as underused (18% adoption, 83% rating it effective), expects authorized push payment reimbursement regulation in North America within two years, and notes 91% agreement that AI can shorten fraud investigations. It also finds 81% of fraud professionals now carry cybersecurity responsibilities.

Help Net Security · 29d agoPhishing & fraud

Berlin investigates new data leak after hackers publish stolen login credentials

Berlin investigates a fresh leak after Rhysida hackers published stolen login credentials; the city refuses to pay the ransom demand.

Berlin confirmed hackers published additional stolen data, including login credentials, from a mid-August cyberattack on two city ministries responsible for urban development/housing and transport/climate. The Rhysida ransomware group claimed the breach in late August, saying it stole 5.79 TB of data including contracts, emails, passwords and classified information; Berlin acknowledged an extortion demand but refused to pay. Berlin's data protection regulator said the leak includes personal data on public employees and possibly residents, such as names, addresses, dates of birth and bank information. Germany's BSI separately linked the campaign to the TerminalFix fake-CAPTCHA technique and the LoremIpsumLoader/AxolotLoader malware tied to financially motivated Rhysida-associated hackers, days before Berlin's Sept. 20 election.

The Record · 9d agoRansomware in the wild1

Visa enhances A2A Protect to stop fraud before money leaves the account

Visa enhanced A2A Protect with a Featurespace-powered unified fraud score to help banks stop account-to-account fraud before funds leave accounts.

Visa announced an updated A2A Protect that integrates Featurespace technology into a unified fraud score, giving banks real-time risk insights on account-to-account payments without waiting for in-house model training or consortium participation. Visa claims a 75% increase in fraud detection within the first six months of deployment and a single API for integration. A2A transaction volume is projected to exceed 5.8 trillion by 2028, up 160% from 2024.

Help Net Security · 15d agoTools

Arrested man allegedly impersonated NSA elite hacking unit, Supreme Court chief justice

Colorado man Joshua Culver indicted for impersonating NSA's Tailored Access Operations chief and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in Indiana court cases.

Joshua Culver, also known as Maverick Young, was arrested in Colorado after a July Indiana indictment on four counts of falsely impersonating an officer of the court and one count of using a forged judge's signature. He allegedly posed as an NSA officer in September to pressure the Tippecanoe County sheriff's office, and later presented a forged document purportedly from the head of the Tailored Access Operations unit demanding case dismissal and warrant quashing. The indictment also alleges he used a forged signature of Chief Justice John Roberts on a dismissal order in Grant County, Indiana.

CyberScoop · 22d agoPolicy & legal2

Fake bank websites play dead to evade security scanners

Fortra uncovered Chameleon SEO Poisoning: cloaked typosquat bank sites rank on Google and Bing to steal credentials while evading scanners, with cases up 40% in Q2 2026.

Fortra's threat intelligence unit FIRE spent three months tracking Chameleon SEO Poisoning, a phishing method that ranks recently registered typosquat domains on second-level domains like .ph.com and .gr.com above legitimate bank sites on Google and Bing. The technique uses presentation control (cloaking by referrer): direct visits get a dead, offline-looking page, while search-referred clicks receive a convincing fake bank login page, letting poisoned results persist for days or weeks. Fortra recorded a 40% jump in cases during the second quarter of 2026 and recommends referrer-spoofed URL testing, faster SLD takedowns, and bookmarking bank logins.

Help Net Security · 24d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild