ZeroHour
DashboardNewsCVEsExploitsIncidentsAIBriefAnalyticsEntitiesWatchlistIOCsAsk the feedSourcesFeeds & APIKiosk mode

Search: “domain adaptation”

118 stories

Searchkeywordsmart Sortlatesthotimportancerelevance
DomainAllCyberAIWindow24h3d7d30dAllIn the wildImportant onlyShow duplicates
CategoryAllExploit / PoC 36Ransomware 24Malware 15Vulnerability 14Threat actor 14Phishing & fraud 9Data breach 4AI safety & security 2Policy & legal 1Advisory 1
SeverityAllcritical 83high 24medium 13low 0info 0

Phishing Campaign Sends Millions of Emails Using Invisible Unicode to Evade Filters

Microsoft warns of a high-volume phishing campaign using invisible Unicode characters to split keywords like 'funding' and evade filters, peaking at 2.37 million daily messages.

Microsoft's Security Research team documented a high-volume phishing operation inserting deprecated Unicode Tags characters (U+E0000-U+E007F) inside financial keywords such as 'funding' so literal-string and regex email filters stop matching them. The campaign ran on a weekly cadence with 1-2.37 million weekday messages between February and May 15, 2026, peaking on February 26, 2026. It used hundreds of disposable finance-themed sender domains and relayed mail through ActiveCampaign's click-tracking infrastructure (acemlnd[.]com, activehosted[.]com), lending legitimate platform reputation. Microsoft ties the activity to an AI-assisted SBA loan phishing campaign that Fortra's FIRE team disclosed in September 2025.

The Hacker News · 12d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

ASCII smuggling crosses over from AI prompt injection to phishing evasion

Microsoft details high-volume phishing campaign using ASCII smuggling (Unicode tag chars) for filter evasion, peaking at 2.3M messages.

Microsoft researchers observed a high-volume finance-themed phishing campaign using invisible Unicode tag characters (U+E0000–U+E007F), a technique known from AI prompt injection research as ASCII smuggling, to split lure words like 'funding' and evade email filters. Telemetry from Microsoft Defender for Office 365 showed signature hits jump from roughly 21,000 messages on February 8, 2026 to more than 1.3 million on February 9, peaking above 2.3 million on February 11, with elevated weekday activity lasting approximately three months. The discovery emerged from prompt injection protection research, showing AI-era evasion techniques crossing into traditional phishing. Most messages were flagged by layered Defender protections rather than a single Unicode-specific signal.

Microsoft Security Blog · 13d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

PaperCut Attacker Uses Hundreds of AI Agents to Compromise 440+ Instances

GreyNoise and Blackpoint tracked an AI-assisted actor using OpenAI Codex and DeepSeek agents to exploit PaperCut flaws across 440+ instances in 48 countries.

A suspected Russian-speaking actor exploited the CVE-2026-81578 authentication bypass and CVE-2026-82078 RCE chain in PaperCut NG/MF, compromising at least 440 instances across 395 organizations in 48 countries, heavily targeting education in the US, UK, France, and elsewhere. The actor used hundreds of AI agents powered by OpenAI Codex and DeepSeek plus tools like Mimikatz, SharpHound, Certipy, Rubeus, and Impacket, reaching domain admin at 12 victims and full domain admin at a US high school within seven minutes. Post-exploitation included registry hive collection and Metasploit/Meterpreter payloads, with origin traced to IP 45.142.193.132.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild 6 sourcesCVE-2026-81578CVE-2026-820781

CTM360 Uncovers Over 3,000 Recruitment Phishing URLs Using Browser-in-the

CTM360's RecruitTrap report documents 3,000+ recruitment phishing URLs using BitB windows to steal credentials and relay MFA.

CTM360 identified over 3,000 phishing URLs impersonating recruiters from more than 50 organizations across 14 sectors in the RecruitTrap campaign. Attacks use Browser-in-the-Browser popups with spoofed address bars to harvest Google and Facebook credentials and relay MFA prompts in real time. About 96% of pages used a Calendly theme, with infrastructure concentrated on AWS EC2 and hidden behind Cloudflare.

The Hacker News · Aug 15, 2026Phishing & fraud in the wild

NightEagle Hackers Target Russian Companies Using GhostContainer Backdoor

Kaspersky links NightEagle (APT-Q-95) intrusions in Russia to stolen VPN credentials, the GhostContainer Exchange backdoor, BlueKeep exploitation, and covert tunneling for espionage.

Kaspersky's Global Emergency Response Team attributes new intrusions against Russian companies to NightEagle (APT-Q-95), active since at least 2023 and previously focused on Asian organizations. The group uses valid VPN credentials, deploys the .NET-based GhostContainer backdoor on Microsoft Exchange servers, and tunnels RDP via Microsoft Dev Tunnels and rdp2tcp. In one incident operators exploited BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) to create an administrator account, and they performed DCSync replication against Active Directory to harvest domain password hashes. GhostContainer reuses code from Neo-reGeorg, ExchangeCmdPy.py (CVE-2020-0688), and ysoserial, and tampers with AMSI and Windows event logging to evade detection.

GBHackers · 1h agoThreat actor in the wild 3 sourcesCVE-2019-0708CVE-2020-0688

ThreatsDay: CEO Phishing Kits, 5K Dropbox Account Hacks, OAuth Traps + 17 More Stories

Microsoft warns of Teams IT-impersonation intrusions deploying Node.js implants; Spring Ring vishing hit 150+ employees across 10 companies; The Gentlemen ransomware claims 683 victims.

Microsoft warned of a human-operated campaign abusing Teams external collaboration to impersonate IT help desk staff, deploy malicious MSI packages staging Node.js runtimes and obfuscated JavaScript implants, then pivot to domain controllers over WinRM. Unit 42 documented the Spring Ring vishing operation targeting over 150 employees across at least 10 companies using 26 attacker identities, including an NTLM relay variant against domain controllers. Sophos reported The Gentlemen ransomware (Gold Sherwood) reached 683 total victims by end of July 2026, adding 169 in July, with a playbook using BYOVD-based EDR killers and backup tampering. Group-IB found the Outsider phishing-as-a-service platform created 700+ new phishing pages within a month despite law enforcement takedowns.

The Hacker News · 13d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Hackers Abuse Claude AI Agents to Automate Cyberattacks, Exploitation and Data Theft

Anthropic reports actors including GTG-20006 (Midnight Blizzard-linked) and ShinyHunters clusters abused Claude AI agents to automate phishing, credential harvesting, and data theft against 20+ organizations.

Anthropic's September 2026 threat intelligence report describes threat actors operating multi-agent workflows built on Claude models to automate the cyber kill chain, from reconnaissance and phishing to exfiltration. The group GTG-20006, assessed as consistent with Midnight Blizzard, targeted Ukrainian and European government, diplomatic, defense, and intelligence entities plus the drone supply chain, with more than 20 organizations identified. Clusters tied to ShinyHunters used 10 AWS EC2 instances to decompile 1.8 million Android APKs for hard-coded secrets and, in a separate SaaS supply chain intrusion, dumped over 2,100 Azure AD token sets across 40+ corporate tenants in about 34 hours. Reported malware families include PowerChrome, WUEngine, Shadow C2, MiniPlasma, CloudSyncSvc, the GiftDrop Android RAT, and the DarkSword iOS exploit chain.

GBHackersupdated · 13h agofirst · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild 20 sources1

China-Based Artificial Intelligence Companies Conducting Industrial-Scale Distillation Campaigns Against U.S. AI Companies

NSA, CISA, and FBI warn DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese AI firms ran industrial-scale distillation of U.S. frontier models, threatening U.S. AI leadership.

A joint NSA, CISA, and FBI Cybersecurity Advisory (AA26-251A) says China-based firms DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens from U.S. frontier models including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, likely with Chinese government knowledge. Campaigns running since at least late 2024 used native APIs, cloud providers, third-party aggregators, gray-market proxy "transfer stations", and shared premium subscriptions to bypass geographic restrictions, evade safeguards, and violate providers' terms of use. The agencies recommend detecting anomalous prompts, accounts, and usage patterns; subtly altering responses to suspected distillers; and cross-organization intelligence sharing. They also call DeepSeek's publicly cited $5.6M training cost misleading because it excludes data acquired through distillation.

CISA Advisories · 8d agoAdvisory in the wild1

ASCII smuggling isn't just an AI security risk

Microsoft tracked a phishing campaign peaking at 2.37 million daily messages that hid financial-lure keywords with invisible Unicode tag characters to evade filters.

Microsoft researchers uncovered a large phishing campaign that inserted invisible Unicode tag characters (e.g., U+E0020) inside common financial keywords like 'funding', splitting words so keyword, signature, and regex matches fail. The campaign peaked at more than 2.37 million messages in late February 2026, ran from about 150 finance-themed sender domains on a strict weekday-only schedule, and gradually declined to under 20% of peak weekday volume by late March, with residual spikes through mid-June. The technique repurposes ASCII smuggling, normally used for indirect prompt injection against AI assistants, for traditional email phishing evasion. Microsoft advises defenders to strip or fold invisible Unicode code points before content matching and to watch for bulk weekday spikes from churning finance-themed domains.

The Register · Security · 12d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1