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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.
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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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Week in review: High severity WordPress vulnerabilities, fake OAuth IDs bypass sign-in logs
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Week in review: cPanel vulnerability actively exploited, DigiCert breach, LinkedIn job scams
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Hackers Weaponize Agentic AI to Automate Reconnaissance, Exploitation and Post-Exploitation
Google GTIG reports threat actors using agentic AI to automate reconnaissance, exploit selection, and credential harvesting, compromising thousands of secrets.
Google Threat Intelligence Group's Q3 2026 AI Threat Tracker documents threat actors operationalizing agentic AI: in one Mandiant investigation, a financially motivated actor built and executed a credential-harvesting operation in under six hours, with an exposed 'Recon' framework managing more than 23,800 harvested secrets including cloud and AI-service API keys. A Chinese-speaking actor tracked as knaithe used a DeepSeek-powered Hermes Agent for automated reconnaissance and vulnerability enumeration, pivoting from Langflow to n8n and enabling manual exploitation of exposed Citrix NetScaler, Marimo, Apache Tomcat, and VPN infrastructure. Operators harvested Citrix session cookies from process memory to bypass MFA, obtained AWS credentials from compromised Marimo instances, and deployed the Go-based NKAbuse backdoor, with reported RCE and data exfiltration. Google notes fully autonomous end-to-end AI attack pipelines have not yet been observed in the wild.
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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.
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AI agents help compress ransomware intrusion to under 10 hours, raising stakes for CISOs
Unit 42 reports AI agents compressed a ransomware intrusion from weeks to under 10 hours, using 50+ MITRE ATT&CK techniques against an enterprise network.
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 investigated a ransomware incident where AI agents moved through an enterprise network in under 10 hours, work that would have taken human operators roughly two weeks. The attacker entered via a public-facing API endpoint, used automated reconnaissance to map microservices, searched source-code repositories for credentials, and accessed a secrets-management system. They hijacked enterprise code workflows to exfiltrate cloud access keys, attempted Terraform backdoors (blocked by branch protections), and used stolen credentials to access the victim's own AI services as attack infrastructure. Over 50 MITRE ATT&CK techniques were observed; the actor confirmed using frontier AI models and agentic frameworks during negotiations.
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Researcher Explains Release of Undisclosed Zero
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Smishing Triad Hackers Use JWR Phishing Kit to Steal Cards, OTPs and Bank Credentials
Group-IB attributes large-scale smishing using the JWR real-time phishing kit to the Smishing Triad's Outsider cluster, harvesting card data, OTPs, and bank credentials.
Group-IB attributes a large-scale SMS phishing campaign to Outsider, an operator sub-cluster within the Smishing Triad phishing-as-a-service ecosystem, using a kit dubbed JWR. The Vue 2-based platform maintains real-time WebSocket communication with operators, enabling them to adapt pages live and harvest roughly 70 PII fields, card data, PINs, OTPs, identity document images, and digital wallet credentials via a dedicated PayPal sub-funnel. Unit 42 previously tied 194,345 malicious domains across 136,933 root domains to the broader operation since January 2024. Defenders can hunt for /api/open/ endpoints, /webSocket/QT/ paths, JWR-prefixed storage artifacts, and a hard-coded WebSocket token.
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Hackers Deploy Agentic AI to Automate Exploitation and Mass Credential Harvesting
Google GTIG documents a financially motivated actor using a multi-agent AI framework to automate credential harvesting, compromising over 23,800 secrets within hours.
Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) documented a financially motivated actor that compromised an unnamed organization's cloud infrastructure and used a multi-agent AI framework to automate vulnerability scanning, credential harvesting, troubleshooting, and IP rotation. The operation went from planning to mass credential compromise in under six hours, harvesting more than 23,800 secrets including cloud and AI-service API keys via an exposed C2 dashboard called 'Recon'. The actor directed specialized agents using an AI coding chatbot and Markdown instruction files such as AGENTS.KNOWLEDGE.md and agentic_vuln_research.md. Google has not observed fully autonomous zero-day exploitation; the shift automates labor-intensive tasks like reconnaissance, account validation, and infrastructure management, sharply shrinking detection windows.
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Hackers Turn Windows Shadow Copies Into a Tool for Credential Theft and Ransomware
Attackers abuse Windows VSS shadow copies to delete recovery points before ransomware and to extract NTDS.dit/SAM credentials, demanding context-aware detection.
Threat actors are weaponizing the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for two purposes: destroying local recovery points via vssadmin.exe, wmic.exe, diskshadow.exe, wbadmin.exe, and bcdedit.exe before encryption, and accessing static copies of locked files such as NTDS.dit and SAM for credential theft. Ransomware families tied to shadow-copy removal include Akira, Black Basta, BlackCat, Conti, LockBit, Qilin, RansomHub, REvil, Ryuk, and WannaCry. Huntress's analysis of the Nightmare-Eclipse tool showed the BlueHammer technique chaining a Windows Defender timing issue with a VSS snapshot to dump the SAM database and decrypt NT hashes. Defenders should correlate VSS operations with parent process, hive access, and subsequent encryption activity, and maintain immutable off-host backups.
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India’s STPI serves TerminalFix-style attack via fake Cloudflare check
India's STPI government website serves a spoofed Cloudflare verification page that preloads malicious commands into visitors' clipboards for execution in Windows Terminal, matching TerminalFix-style attacks.
A malicious external JavaScript on the ananta.stpi[.]in subdomain of India's Software Technology Parks of India displays a fake Cloudflare 'Verify you are human' prompt and silently writes a URL into the visitor's clipboard, instructing the user to paste and execute it in Windows Terminal. Researcher Vibhum Dubey reported the behavior to STPI and CERT-In; the script loads from the recently registered cdn[.]quickdelivr[.]com and assigns each visitor a unique session identifier. The malicious script remained embedded after the overlay briefly disappeared, and the destination URL was flagged as malicious by 17 VirusTotal engines. No attribution has been established, though the pattern matches Microsoft's TerminalFix, a variant of ClickFix.
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ownCloud vulnerability with maximum 10 severity score comes under “mass” exploitation
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Detecting cloud ransomware in Azure with Tenable One’s cloud detection and response capabilities
Tenable details ransomware group Storm-0501's Azure tenant-hijacking tactics and how its cloud detection and response identifies them.
Tenable's blog describes how cybercrime group Storm-0501 conducts cloud-first ransomware campaigns against Azure environments. The group has shifted from endpoint encryption to total hijacking of cloud tenants and systematically neutralizes resource locks, immutability policies, and backups. Tenable outlines its One Cloud Exposure detections, using AI-powered threat stories and precision alerts, to expose these TTPs early.
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