Phishing Attacks Serve Browser-in-the-Browser Pages, Rogue RMM Persistence
Phishing emails with browser-in-the-browser fake Adobe pages trick users into installing rogue ScreenConnect clients granting persistent remote access.
Huntress SOC investigated two August incidents where phishing links led to fake CAPTCHA checks and Adobe PDF Reader lures rendered as browser-in-the-browser (BiTB) pages spoofing legitimate domains like get.adobe.com. Victims downloaded what they believed was Acrobat Reader but actually installed ScreenConnect.ClientSetup.exe from attacker infrastructure, yielding two rogue ScreenConnect clients with service-based persistence. The attacker used cmd.exe and curl to stage a second client connecting to 144.172.115.59, leveraged a ScreenConnect Trial Relay domain for stealth, and ran HideCursor.exe as a defense-evasion binary. Incident 2 arrived via AT&T Office@Hand (RingCentral), with both chains stopped before broader impact.
Syniverse enters merger agreement with M3-Brigade Acquisition II, becoming a publicly traded company
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.
IoT Under Siege: The Anatomy of the Latest Mirai Campaign Leveraging Multiple IoT Exploits
Unit 42 tracks a Mirai botnet campaign exploiting over 20 IoT vulnerabilities in routers, cameras and DVRs to build DDoS botnets since March 2023.
Since March 2023, Unit 42 has tracked threat actors exploiting more than 20 IoT vulnerabilities to spread a Mirai botnet variant, first seen downloading payloads from zvub.us on March 14, 2023. Exploited flaws span CVE-2023-1389 (TP-Link Archer), CVE-2022-30525 (Zyxel), CVE-2022-31499 (Nortek) and many router, camera and DVR bugs. The variant decrypts configuration strings with an XOR key derived from 0xDEADBEEF and lacks built-in credential brute forcing, so spreading relies on manual operator exploitation. Two campaigns observed since October 2022 share infrastructure and near-identical samples.