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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

HBO Max Reddit account compromised to serve ClickFix attacks

Attackers hijacked HBO Max's verified Reddit account to run 108 ClickFix malvertising ads delivering infostealers, loaders, and crypto clippers to Windows and macOS users.

Attackers compromised the verified HBO Max Reddit account (u/hbomax) to push 108 malicious ads in a 48-hour malvertising blitz named PasteSwitch, analyzed by Hudson Rock and ADAMnetworks. The ClickFix lures directed victims to fake landing pages instructing them to paste commands into Terminal, delivering OS-targeted infostealers, malware loaders, and cryptocurrency clippers. Lures included 46 HBO Max ads, 36 fake OpenAI Codex ads, 15 fake macOS disk utilities, and 11 developer-tool ads. The AnimateClipper and ZigClipper payloads use Binance Smart Chain contracts as resilient C2 fallback, with 36 mainnet changes observed between March and July 2026; Reddit paused the ads three days after discovery and is investigating.

The Register · Securityupdated · 2d agofirst · 2d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 7 sources

Hundreds of fake government websites target users in Central Asia

F6 uncovered 360+ fake government and news websites scamming Central Asians with bogus state payouts that harvest personal data and install mobile malware.

F6 researchers identified more than 360 fraudulent domains impersonating government portals and regional news outlets in Uzbekistan, Belarus and Tajikistan. Sites promise weekly payments such as 15 million Uzbek sums (about $1,300) to lure victims into submitting names and phone numbers. Scammers then call posing as personal managers, demanding fees, requesting passport scans, or directing victims to install a malicious mobile app that grants device control. The group behind the campaign is unidentified and victim counts are unknown.

The Record · 2d agoPhishing & fraud

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

ClickFix attacks are tricking Mac and Windows users into hacking themselves

ClickFix campaigns trick users into pasting terminal commands via fake CAPTCHAs; latest wave abused HBO Max's hacked Reddit account to push infostealer ads.

ClickFix attacks use fake CAPTCHA or anti-bot prompts on hacked or counterfeit websites to convince victims to copy a command into Windows Command Prompt or macOS Terminal, instantly installing infostealers that steal passwords, logged-in sessions, and crypto wallets. The latest campaign compromised HBO Max's official Reddit account to post hundreds of fake ads linking to a spoofed HBO Max page carrying the lure, per researchers at Hudson Rock. It is unclear how many users were compromised. Because execution happens in the terminal, many attacks evade antivirus tools; enterprises can block terminals domain-wide and Mac users can deploy BlockBlock.

TechCrunch · Security · 2d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

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 · 21m agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

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

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

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

Scammers leave AI fingerprints all over fake antivirus renewal page

Malwarebytes found an AI-built fake Avast renewal page in Belgium whose contractor-style code comments show scammers now generate polished pages with AI.

Malwarebytes analyzed a fake Avast Premium Security renewal page targeting Belgian users, claiming a €129.99 subscription renewal and asking for name, email, and Belgian mobile number. Harvested numbers feed callback scams where fake support agents persuade victims to install remote access software. French comments in the code, written like an AI assistant's unfinished handover, plus leftover styling and feature-free marketing copy suggest the page was generated with AI, meaning convincing localized scam pages can now be produced in minutes.

GhostCode Abuses Microsoft Entra Device Enrollment to Maintain Access After Token Revocation

eSentire exposes GhostCode, a device-code phishing kit that abuses Microsoft Entra device enrollment to persist even after stolen tokens are revoked.

eSentire's Threat Response Unit observed GhostCode campaigns in late August 2026, using BEC-style social engineering that impersonated procurement staff, including BJ's Wholesale Club, via Salesforce contact forms. Victims received password-protected HTML lures disguised as a FlipBook document portal, with junk-data padding, HTML comment injection, and AES-256-GCM encrypted redirects gated by anti-bot checks. The kit exploits the OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant, prompting victims to approve real Microsoft device-code sign-ins with MFA. Within 78 seconds of approval, attackers registered three Entra devices and obtained a Primary Refresh Token, so rogue device registrations persist even after session token revocation.

GBHackersupdated · 23h agofirst · 1d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 2 sources2

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

N0va Phishkit Targets US and EU Businesses: A New Challenge for Identity Security

N0va phishkit targets US and EU organizations with trusted-brand lures, capturing tokens via legitimate authentication flows to gain SSO access to corporate resources.

The N0va phishing kit targets organizations in government, technology, consulting, and healthcare across North America and Europe with lures impersonating Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, DocuSign, Google Drive, Dropbox, Zoom, and Adobe Sign. Victims are guided through legitimate authentication flows, including device code phishing, after which N0va captures access and refresh tokens and abuses token-exchange or device-registration mechanisms to establish SSO access. ANY.RUN tracks the campaign via a characteristic /api/verification/init URL pattern and demonstrates detection in its interactive sandbox.

The Hacker News · 1d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 2 sources3

Smishing Triad Hackers Use JWR Phishing Kit to Steal Cards, OTPs and Bank Credentials

Group-IB attributes large-scale smishing using the JWR real-time phishing kit to the Smishing Triad's Outsider cluster, harvesting card data, OTPs, and bank credentials.

Group-IB attributes a large-scale SMS phishing campaign to Outsider, an operator sub-cluster within the Smishing Triad phishing-as-a-service ecosystem, using a kit dubbed JWR. The Vue 2-based platform maintains real-time WebSocket communication with operators, enabling them to adapt pages live and harvest roughly 70 PII fields, card data, PINs, OTPs, identity document images, and digital wallet credentials via a dedicated PayPal sub-funnel. Unit 42 previously tied 194,345 malicious domains across 136,933 root domains to the broader operation since January 2024. Defenders can hunt for /api/open/ endpoints, /webSocket/QT/ paths, JWR-prefixed storage artifacts, and a hard-coded WebSocket token.

GBHackersupdated · 1d agofirst · 1d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 2 sources