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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.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 6 sources

FBI raises alarm over deceptive phishing campaign targeting prominent people

The FBI warns of an ongoing OAuth consent phishing campaign granting attackers persistent access to high-profile victims' cloud accounts without passwords.

The FBI says attackers impersonate government officials, journalists and event coordinators on commercial messaging apps to trick prominent individuals, their families and acquaintances into authorizing malicious OAuth applications on Microsoft or Google cloud services. Once approved, attackers gain persistent access to emails, files and other sensitive data; the access survives password changes and bypasses MFA, and can only be revoked by invalidating the OAuth token in security settings. The campaign has been tracked since late 2025, and the FBI advises independently verifying senders and granting access only to trusted applications.

CyberScoop · 15d agoPhishing & fraud

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

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 · 17h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

40 Malicious Firefox Extensions Pose as Web3 Products to Steal Wallet Secrets

Socket found 40 malicious Firefox extensions impersonating OKX, Rabby Wallet, and TronLink to steal cryptocurrency wallet recovery phrases and private keys.

The Socket Threat Research team identified 40 malicious Firefox extensions masquerading as Web3 products including OKX, Rabby Wallet, and TronLink, part of a broader set of 77 add-ons sharing source code and infrastructure overlaps. The campaign, dubbed Offside Wallet Theft Factory, has been active since March 2026 and remains unattributed. Of the 40 confirmed malicious extensions, 15 capture recovery phrases and private keys exfiltrated through Cloudflare Workers, 13 modified Rabby Wallet builds exfiltrate serialized keyrings before local encryption, seven use attacker-controlled Supabase projects as remote switches, and five capture credentials and clipboard data via hard-coded C2. Some extensions began as sports score or utility shells before being repurposed into wallet stealers under the same Firefox ID.

The Hacker News · 27d agoMalware in the wild