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Most Fraudulent Hires Receive Credentials Before Detection

HYPR report finds 42% of fraudulent hires pass screening and receive corporate credentials, averaging 5.73 days of unmonitored network access before detection.

A HYPR study of 500 US HR executives found 42% of fraudulent candidates pass pre-hire screening and get hired, with only 3% detected on their hire day and 20% remaining undetected up to three weeks. This gives fraudulent hires an average of 5.73 days of unmonitored corporate network access, and 98% of surveyed executives said they had experienced candidate fraud firsthand. The report follows a September 9 CISA update to its Insider Threat Mitigation Guide warning that malicious actors use AI tools to obtain remote IT jobs, a tactic long used by North Korean actors for data theft and extortion.

Infosecurity Magazine · 1d agoPhishing & fraud

PAPERMILL Hackers Abuse Signed Notepad++ to Deploy VenomRAT in Tax Audit Attacks

PAPERMILL phishing campaign abuses a signed Notepad++ copy and tax-audit lures to deploy VenomRAT against targets in India.

JUMPSEC tracks PAPERMILL as an emerging cluster whose emails pass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and deliver tax-audit themed disk images. The mounted image pairs a legitimately signed, renamed executable with a rogue libcurl.dll for DLL sideloading, then uses a Donut shellcode loader to run VenomRAT 6.0.3 in memory with hidden VNC, data-stealing, and file-grabbing capabilities. The loader includes anti-analysis checks and RunOnce persistence, and lures plus China-connected infrastructure overlap with the Silver Fox ecosystem, though attribution remains unconfirmed.

Cyber Security News · 1d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 2 sources

T-Mobile rewards points expiry texts are a phishing scam

Malwarebytes tracks an SMS phishing campaign, active since May 2026, impersonating T-Mobile rewards expiry with 1,000+ templates and 81 rotating domains to lure victims.

Malwarebytes Labs has monitored a large smishing campaign since early May 2026 that falsely claims recipients' T-Mobile Rewards points are expiring, using invented balances like 18,400 points and imminent deadlines to create urgency. Researchers identified more than 1,000 semantically similar message templates (199 scoring at least 0.95 similarity) that vary only in salutation, headline, expiry date, and point balance. The links resolve to rotating domains such as t-mobile.biktpw[.]top, with at least 81 short-lived domains observed over four months, pushing victims to fake redemption pages where they may enter credentials or payment details. Activity peaked in two large spikes and has since declined, though messages are still circulating.

Malwarebytes Labs · 3h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Hacked Thai College Website Abused to Redirect Google Searchers to Illegal Online Casinonew

ADEX uncovered a hacked Thai college domain serving casino pages through real Google search redirects, part of a global campaign compromising government and education sites.

Anti-fraud platform ADEX found a casino-themed page planted on the compromised km.chpc.ac.th domain in Thailand's educational .ac.th zone, which Google indexed and ranked first to redirect users to illegal online gambling. The scheme achieved full ad cloaking without deploying any cloaking code by chaining a genuine Google results page and a third-party redirect. The same domain-borrowing tactic is tracked globally: Thailand reports roughly 30 million gambling URLs across about 1,000 public-sector sites, Indonesia blocked 683 government and education sites, and Netcraft found an underground market selling access to more than 15,000 compromised .gov, .edu and ccTLD domains. ADEX argues Google's site reputation abuse policy does not cover institutions that are hijacked without their knowledge.

Cyber Security News · 17m agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Phishing Attacks Abuse Trusted Email Infrastructure and URL Cloaking to Evade Security Filters

VBSpam Q3 2026 test shows phishers abusing DKIM-aligned domains, Amazon SES, and multi-stage URL cloaking to defeat email filters.

Virus Bulletin's Q3 2026 VBSpam test (AMTSO-LS1-TP207) found phishing campaigns moving payloads past the email itself via browser-fingerprinting gates, redirect chains, and hidden POST requests. Examples include a Dutch McAfee/TotalAV scareware renewal scam, a German overdue-payment Web3 fraud delivered via Amazon SES from DKIM-aligned moolaah.com, and Romanian BCR PSD2 credential phishing embedding IPv6-mapped URLs resolving to 103.193.179.223. Net at Work NoSpamProxy ranked first with a 99.995 score while open-source Rspamd caught only 62.55% of phishing mail.

GBHackers · 2d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 2 sources

North Korean IT Workers Pay People to Sit Through Job Interviews While They Control the Computernew

Silent Push found North Korean IT workers recruiting on-camera proxies for job interviews while remotely controlling the computer, defeating identity and location checks.

Silent Push researchers engaged the "Tec Guru" persona via Discord and Telegram and assessed with moderate-to-high confidence that the operator is a North Korean IT worker recruiting on-camera proxies in the US, Europe, and Latin America for a 35/65 revenue split. During Google Meet interviews, the proxy stays on camera while the real worker supplies answers via ChatGPT-generated prompts, real-time messaging, or remote-control tools such as AnyDesk and TeamViewer. Successfully placed workers can access source code, cloud tenants, and CI/CD systems, and payments create sanctions exposure; the US, Japan, South Korea, and eight other governments issued a joint identity-verification alert on July 31, 2026.

GBHackers · 1h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 2 sources

Search results are sending people to fake Bitrefill checkouts

Scam sites impersonating Bitrefill's crypto checkout appear in search results, tricking victims into sending up to $1,990 in crypto directly to scammers.

Malwarebytes documents a cluster of lookalike domains copying Bitrefill's gift card checkout, surfaced via search engine results rather than email. Victims choose an amount up to $1,990 and pay in Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC, USDT, Solana, or Litecoin to scammer-controlled addresses, with no recourse since crypto payments are irreversible. Domains use typosquatting and Punycode/IDN homoglyph tricks, and the fake sites run commercial analytics software to measure and optimize victim conversion. Bitrefill's security team is working with takedown specialists to remove the sites.

Malwarebytes Labs · 2d agoPhishing & fraud

The sexy AI-powered dating app scams are here

Anthropic exposed a network of roughly 28 AI-driven dating apps using autonomous personas and gig workers to defraud paying users.

Anthropic threat intelligence uncovered a fraud network of around 28 dating apps after a prepaid account sent over 100,000 Claude API requests daily, with most chats run by autonomous AI personas and no human agent. Researchers Matthew Gore-Kormanik and Anthropic's Chris Cronbaugh documented apps including Dora, Romi, and Doni, which monetize conversations via coins; gig workers were hired only to pass liveness checks and select pregenerated replies. An operations manual written in Chinese was found inside the Doni app, and Anthropic published findings in its September 2026 AI misuse report.

The Verge · AI · 23h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild