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Cortex XDR™ Detects New Phishing Campaign Installing NetSupport Manager RAT
Cortex XDR threat hunters uncovered a phishing campaign delivering the NetSupport Manager RAT via a fake password-protected NortonLifelock Word document.
Unit 42 identified a January 2020 phishing campaign using a Microsoft Word document disguised as a password-protected NortonLifelock file. Enabling macros triggered an obfuscated command that built alpaca.bat in the temp directory, which used msiexec to download an MSI payload from quickwaysignstx.com, filtered on the Windows Installer user-agent string. The payload installed a PowerShell script and the campaign, which has delivered NetSupport Manager RAT since at least 2018, showed related activity dating back to early November 2019.
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TrickBot Campaign Uses Fake Payroll Emails to Conduct Phishing Attacks
TrickBot phishing campaign used SendGrid, fake Google Docs, and Drive-hosted downloaders disguised as Word files to deliver a credential-stealing payload.
Unit 42 identified a TrickBot distribution campaign on November 7-8, 2019, using payroll and annual bonus-themed emails sent from likely compromised .edu addresses through the legitimate SendGrid email delivery service. Emails contained links to Google Docs documents linking to downloader executables hosted on Google Drive, further masked behind SendGrid click-tracking URLs. The downloaders, signed by PERISMOUNT LIMITED and displayed with Microsoft Word icons, show a decoy pop-up and retrieve TrickBot payloads from compromised legitimate domains such as savute[.]in and lindaspryinteriordesign[.]com. The newer TrickBot variant stores its files and configuration under %APPDATA%\cashcore.
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ASCII smuggling crosses over from AI prompt injection to phishing evasion
Microsoft details high-volume phishing campaign using ASCII smuggling (Unicode tag chars) for filter evasion, peaking at 2.3M messages.
Microsoft researchers observed a high-volume finance-themed phishing campaign using invisible Unicode tag characters (U+E0000–U+E007F), a technique known from AI prompt injection research as ASCII smuggling, to split lure words like 'funding' and evade email filters. Telemetry from Microsoft Defender for Office 365 showed signature hits jump from roughly 21,000 messages on February 8, 2026 to more than 1.3 million on February 9, peaking above 2.3 million on February 11, with elevated weekday activity lasting approximately three months. The discovery emerged from prompt injection protection research, showing AI-era evasion techniques crossing into traditional phishing. Most messages were flagged by layered Defender protections rather than a single Unicode-specific signal.
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ASCII smuggling isn't just an AI security risk
Microsoft tracked a phishing campaign peaking at 2.37 million daily messages that hid financial-lure keywords with invisible Unicode tag characters to evade filters.
Microsoft researchers uncovered a large phishing campaign that inserted invisible Unicode tag characters (e.g., U+E0020) inside common financial keywords like 'funding', splitting words so keyword, signature, and regex matches fail. The campaign peaked at more than 2.37 million messages in late February 2026, ran from about 150 finance-themed sender domains on a strict weekday-only schedule, and gradually declined to under 20% of peak weekday volume by late March, with residual spikes through mid-June. The technique repurposes ASCII smuggling, normally used for indirect prompt injection against AI assistants, for traditional email phishing evasion. Microsoft advises defenders to strip or fold invisible Unicode code points before content matching and to watch for bulk weekday spikes from churning finance-themed domains.
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Inside Knight Office, a New M365 AiTM Phishing Kit
Huntress details Knight Office, a new AiTM phishing kit stealing Microsoft 365 session tokens and registering attacker-controlled devices.
Huntress investigated an August 18, 2026 adversary-in-the-middle attack using the Knight Office phishing kit, which captured Microsoft 365 session tokens via a DocuSign-style lure routed through a Monday.com tracking link and a compromised Joomla site. After token capture, the actor enrolled an unauthorized host in Microsoft Entra ID and bound a Windows Hello for Business key credential to the account. The kit's operator console, found at IP 104.37.188.94, is built on Python Flask and hosts at least 25 .vu phishing domains. Telemetry links the kit to at least nine token-replay logins in two weeks and roughly 700 reported lure emails since April.
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