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Protecting organizations from AI-assisted executive impersonation and invoice fraud
Microsoft tracked a campaign of over one million AI-crafted CEO-impersonation emails seeking ~$50,000 ACH payments with fabricated ServiceNow invoices.
Between August 3 and 5, Microsoft detected a campaign of more than one million fraud emails, 87.7% of them targeting US enterprise users, sent through multiple third-party email delivery service accounts. The actor impersonated CEOs, CFOs, and presidents of targeted companies, urging accounts payable staff to process an ACH payment of nearly $50,000. Lures layered executive impersonation, lookalike domains, a fabricated ServiceNow 'Annual Subscription' invoice personalized to the recipient, and forged forwarded email threads; Microsoft found no evidence ServiceNow or the referenced executives were compromised. Microsoft observed indicators consistent with generative AI-assisted template creation, while leftover inconsistencies such as missing forwarding headers and mismatched display names gave defenders detection cues.
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Network Abuses Leveraging High-Profile Events: Suspicious Domain Registrations and Other Scams
Unit 42 found scammers surge deceptive domain registrations around major events like the 2024 Paris Olympics to run phishing and counterfeit merchandise scams.
Unit 42 analyzed newly registered domains (over 200,000 detected daily from zone files, WHOIS, and passive DNS) containing event-specific keywords, using the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics as a case study. Threat actors register lookalike domains to sell counterfeit merchandise, push fraudulent services, and run phishing, as previously seen with COVID-19-themed and fake ChatGPT tool scams. The article recommends monitoring domain registrations, DNS and URL traffic trends, textual patterns, and verdict change requests to catch event-themed abuse early.
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Passkey-themed phishing attacks lead to Microsoft 365 data theft
Microsoft links ShinyHunters- and Helix-affiliated actors to passkey-themed vishing and device-code phishing that compromises Microsoft 365 accounts and steals cloud data.
Microsoft attributes passkey- and SSO-themed social engineering activity, observed since May 2026, to Storm-3121 (linked to ShinyHunters and Falcon) and Storm-3032 (tied to BlackFile members now operating as Helix). Attackers impersonate corporate IT help desks by phone or SMS, urging fake passkey, MFA, or SSO updates and directing victims to adversary-in-the-middle phishing pages or device-code authentication flows that yield credentials, session tokens, and OAuth tokens. Post-compromise behavior includes Microsoft Graph enumeration of users, SharePoint, and OAuth grants, plus persistence via attacker-controlled MFA methods. Google Threat Intelligence tracks related activity as UNC6671, linked to the BlackFile, Helix, Falcon, Pink, and Redact extortion gangs.
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