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Google Play Early Access Abused to Push Thousands of Deceptive Android Apps
Bitdefender found abuse of Google Play's review-free Early Access program to push thousands of deceptive casino and reward apps promoted with AI deepfake ads.
Bitdefender reports threat actors are abusing Google Play's Early Access program, which blocks public reviews and ratings, to distribute thousands of deceptive casino, reward, and utility apps. A GTA imitator, 'Vice Streets: Open World,' surpassed 1 million downloads before disappearing, with apps promoted via AI celebrity deepfake ads on TikTok and Facebook and monetized through endless ad serving and payouts that never arrive. The report coincides with disclosures on Android malware families Hagaseca, Mantax Otax, StreamRat, and GoldFactory's Gigabud banking trojan with its Vwork companion app used for cloned-app financial fraud.
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NovaCookies Campaigns Abuse Genuine Docusign Notifications to Steal Microsoft 365 Sessions
NovaCookies AitM phishing kit, a Sneaky 2FA variant, uses genuine Docusign lures to steal Microsoft 365 sessions at hundreds of organizations.
Island disclosed NovaCookies, a $320/month adversary-in-the-middle phishing-as-a-service platform that relays Microsoft 365 sign-ins through attacker infrastructure to capture credentials, MFA codes, and authenticated sessions. Campaigns abuse genuine Docusign envelopes and Microsoft/Google redirect hops so each step looks legitimate, with lure domains on .vu and alternating-case labels such as PwPt-sHaRe. Proofpoint assesses NovaCookies as a Sneaky 2FA variant with added flows for Okta and Entra domains federated to GoDaddy, and a fully managed PhaaS model. It has targeted hundreds of organizations in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, Israel, and the U.A.E., and is advertised via Telegram with anti-analysis checks like a Cloudflare gate.
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Smishing Hackers Can Watch Every Keystroke as Victims Enter Card Details and OTPs
Group-IB details the JWR smishing kit, used by the Outsider cluster, that streams keystrokes and OTPs to fraudsters in real time via WebSocket.
Group-IB linked the JWR phishing kit to an operator cluster it tracks as Outsider within the broader Smishing Triad ecosystem. Fake toll, parcel, and delivery messages lead to live phishing pages that capture card numbers, passwords, and one-time passcodes before victims submit forms. The kit supports up to 32 guided pages, AES-256-CTR wrapped traffic with keys embedded per message, rotating short links and domains, and WordPress or Shopify integration markers, enabling account takeover and unauthorized payments.
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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.
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