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Scam Attacks Taking Advantage of the Popularity of the Generative AI Wave

Unit 42 finds about 225 generative AI-themed domains registered daily since ChatGPT's launch, with nearly 29 percent suspicious, fueling scams and PUP delivery.

Palo Alto Networks analyzed new domain registrations containing generative AI keywords such as chatgpt, prompt, and sora since ChatGPT's November 2022 launch, observing around 225 GenAI-related registrations per day. About 28.75 percent of these domains are suspicious, a rate 22 times higher than for general new domains, with registration spikes aligning with milestones like Bing ChatGPT integration, the GPT-4 release, new GPTs, and OpenAI's Sora announcement. Over 72 percent of the domains use gpt or chatgpt keywords, and gpt domains show a 76 percent suspicious rate. Case studies cover PUP delivery, spam distribution, and monetized domain parking, with 35 percent of traffic to these domains directed at suspicious ones.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Phishing & fraud in the wild1

Risky Bulletin: BEC campaign steals €35 million from French notaries

Hackers stole over €35 million from 500+ French notary offices in a four-year BEC campaign; ANSSI spent two years helping evict the attackers.

A business email compromise campaign breached more than 500 French notary offices — about 7% of all French notaries per the Conseil Supérieur du Notariat — over four years, stealing more than €35 million by phishing initial access and silently modifying wire transfer details. France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI worked for two years behind the scenes to help notaries remove the persistent attackers, who had deep access; officials also feared hackers could issue fake notarized acts such as marriage certificates or forged real estate deals. No forged documents have been found so far, but notaries have added two-factor authentication and in-person requirements for banking details, and banks added extra checks in 2024. The newsletter also notes other incidents, including a $320 million Bitcoin extraction from Blockstream's Liquid Network and a JetBrains Cadence breach via TeamCity servers.

Risky Business News · 10d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

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.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Phishing & fraud in the wild

The Smishing Deluge: China-Based Campaign Flooding Global Text Messages

Unit 42 attributes a global smishing campaign with 194,000+ phishing domains impersonating tolls, banks, and couriers to the Smishing Triad.

Palo Alto Unit 42 attributes ongoing smishing texts about toll violations and package misdelivery to the Smishing Triad, targeting U.S. residents since April 2024. Researchers identified 194,345 FQDNs across 136,933 root domains registered since January 2024, mostly via Hong Kong registrar Dominet (HK) Limited with Chinese nameservers and hosting concentrated on U.S. cloud services. The decentralized campaign impersonates banking, cryptocurrency, e-commerce, healthcare, law enforcement, and social media services, and its scale points to a large phishing-as-a-service operation. Phishing pages harvest national ID numbers such as Social Security numbers, home addresses, payment details, and login credentials.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Phishing & fraud in the wild1

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

BigBear 2.0 Evilginx2 Phishing Campaign Bypasses Microsoft 365 MFA With Session Cookie Theft

CloudSEK identified BigBear 2.0, an Evilginx2-based AiTM phishing operation stealing Microsoft 365 MFA session cookies, hitting 461 organizations across 40-plus countries.

The campaign proxies Microsoft sign-in pages to capture credentials and authenticated session cookies, enabling session replay into email, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and connected SSO applications. CloudSEK's June 2026 discovery found 5,137 stolen records, 1,032 passwords, and 4,148 session cookies tied to 3,331 victim IPs, linked to operator 'General Boss' across 42 VPS nodes. The operation targeted IT services and managed service providers, used country-matched residential proxies, and involved at least five affiliates.

Cyber Security News · 9d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

ShinyHunters taunts ReliaQuest after its own employee falls for social engineering attack

ShinyHunters mocked ReliaQuest after a fake-SSO social engineering call gave attackers brief view-only access to its identity dashboard via one employee.

ReliaQuest confirmed that on August 22, 2026, a caller posing as a named security team member directed an employee to a fake single sign-on page, capturing a password and an approved MFA push notification. The attackers, linked to extortion group ShinyHunters, obtained brief view-only access to the identity dashboard, with no applications, systems, or customer data reached and no persistence established. ShinyHunters posted screenshots claiming access to a ReliaQuest Okta SSO account on its leak site on August 23, contradicting the company's account. The incident followed ReliaQuest's warning about a ShinyHunters campaign using .claims TLD domains to impersonate legal, help desk, and IT staff.

Help Net Security · 23d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

Bogus recruiters go after high-value corporate credentials on mobile

Zimperium details browser-in-the-browser recruitment scams stealing corporate credentials on mobile, impersonating Amazon, Apple, Boeing, and Deloitte.

Zimperium reports scammers posing as HR staff use browser-in-the-browser (BitB) phishing via fake interview scheduling flows to steal corporate credentials. The kit pre-qualifies victims by rejecting personal email addresses, then captures credentials that grant OAuth tokens, internal communications, and cloud access enabling lateral movement. Domains impersonating Amazon, Louis Vuitton, Apple, FIFA, Boeing, Deloitte and others were tracked for a year, mostly hosted on AWS and SEDO, with 46 previously unpublished IOCs released.

Help Net Security · 22d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

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

Delta investigates in-flight Wi-Fi spoofing on post

A passenger on Delta flight 591 allegedly spoofed the airline's in-flight Wi-Fi with a rogue access point, prompting an FBI and FAA investigation.

Delta Airlines is investigating an incident on flight 591 from Las Vegas to Atlanta in which a passenger reportedly created a rogue Wi-Fi network named 'Delta WiFi Fast' to steal sensitive passenger data. The cabin crew deactivated the aircraft's Wi-Fi for roughly 30 minutes, and Delta says flight safety and aircraft operating systems were never affected. The FBI's Atlanta office and the FAA acknowledged awareness of the incident, which bears hallmarks of an evil twin attack involving spoofed login portals and credential harvesting. DEF CON organizers said this year's conference in Las Vegas also suffered multiple similar deauthentication Wi-Fi attacks.

CyberScoop · Aug 11, 2026Phishing & fraud in the wild

TerminalFix Uses Fake Cloudflare CAPTCHAs to Deploy Reverse

Microsoft details TerminalFix, a ClickFix variant using fake Cloudflare CAPTCHAs to make users run PowerShell payloads with reverse-tunnel implants.

Microsoft disclosed TerminalFix campaigns that direct users to run commands in Windows Terminal or PowerShell instead of the Run dialog, increasing the chance multi-line scripts execute. Compromised websites serve fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA verifications; the resulting PowerShell command downloads a ZIP with legitimate LockScreenContentServer.exe and rogue dui70.dll for DLL sideloading, retrieves payloads hidden in PNG images from attacker domains, persists via Registry Run keys and scheduled tasks, and performs domain trust and Active Directory reconnaissance. A Python-based reverse-tunnel implant (client.py) tunnels arbitrary TCP traffic over an encrypted WebSocket to gitnow[.]dev:443, giving attackers network-level proxy access that could enable privilege escalation, security-tool tampering, data theft or ransomware. Microsoft recommends AppLocker restrictions, PowerShell script block logging and ClickFix awareness training.

The Hacker News · 18d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

ApateWeb: An Evasive Large-Scale Scareware and PUP Delivery Campaign

Unit 42 uncovers ApateWeb, a campaign using over 130,000 domains and multilayered redirects to deliver scareware, adware and PUPs to millions of users.

Unit 42 discovered ApateWeb, a large-scale campaign using a network of more than 130,000 domains to deliver scareware, potentially unwanted programs, adware including a rogue browser and browser extensions, and scam pages. The campaign uses a three-layer structure with deceptive emails as the entry point, centralized victim tracking via UUIDs, intermediate adware or anti-bot redirections, and evasion tactics such as cloaking, bot detection error pages, and wildcard DNS abuse. Activity spiked since August 2022, with several hundred attacker-controlled sites remaining in Tranco's top 1 million rankings and millions of monthly hits; Unit 42 blocked an estimated 3.5 million sessions across 74,711 devices in November 2023.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Phishing & fraud in the wild

US Becomes Top Target in RMM Phishing Campaign Spanning 46 Countries

ANY.RUN linked 601 RMM-tool phishing cases across 46 countries, with the US the top target at 45% of observed activity.

A phishing campaign that tricks victims into installing legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) software spans 46 countries, with around 45% of observed activity targeting the United States, according to ANY.RUN. Lures include Canada Revenue Agency tax forms, UPS shipping notices, Adobe PDF pages, Social Security Administration themes and invoices, delivered through rapidly rotated Vercel, GitHub Pages and Netlify infrastructure. Researchers identified 425 kit URLs across 240 hosts, 94% of which appeared for only a single day, while stable kit indicators such as font1.woff2 and the secure.html to project/*.zip chain tie the infrastructure together.

The Hacker News · 14d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

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 sources2