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Hackers Spend Nearly $7 Million on Expired Domains to Redirect Traffic to Scams and Malware
Infoblox reports Sable Squirrel spent nearly $7 million on expired domains to redirect traffic to illegal sports streaming, gambling, and malware infrastructure.
Infoblox tracked 50,400 dropcatch domains re-registered daily in gTLDs during H1 2026, nearly 20% of all registrations, with .net and .xyz leading. The threat actor Sable Squirrel has acquired more than 10,000 expired domains supporting Asian sports piracy brands such as Xoilac, Cakhia, 90phut, Socolive, and MiTom while promoting betting services like VSBet, ColaScore, and 8xbet. The operation, assessed as Vietnam-based and overlapping the dismantled Xoi Lac TV streaming network, targets users in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia via a traffic distribution system, publishes Android apps through suspected compromised Google Play developer accounts, and deployed over 31,000 malware samples including Quasar RAT, AsyncRAT, DCRat, NanoCore, Remcos RAT, and njRAT.
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Crooks Are Buying Your Expired Domains and Using Them to Deliver Malware
Infoblox finds dropcatch expired domains fuel malware delivery and C2, with actor Sable Squirrel spending ~$7M on 10,000+ domains.
Infoblox Threat Intel reports that in H1 2026 dropcatch (re-registered expired) domains made up nearly 20% of all new registrations, about 65,000 per day, inheriting reputation and traffic that attackers exploit. Threat actor Sable Squirrel spent nearly $7 million on 10,000+ expired domains, running Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Australian streaming platforms (Xoilac, Cakhia, 90phut) that double as C2 servers for Quasar RAT, AsyncRAT, DCRat and Remcos RAT. Scavenger actors like Shady Squirrel acquire previously compromised domains and feed inherited traffic to SocGholish and tech support scam networks.
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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.
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New Phishing Attack Uses Blob URLs to Hide Malicious Pages From Security Scanners
Barracuda detailed a DocuSign-themed phishing campaign that renders credential-harvesting pages as browser blob URLs, evading URL reputation and blocklist defenses.
Barracuda researchers report a credential-harvesting phishing campaign that starts with a DocuSign-themed email containing a calendar invitation and routes victims through legitimate Microsoft OAuth endpoints and Microsoft Teams. A crafted redirect parameter leads Teams to load external content from cdn.bloom[.]io, which the browser renders as a blob URL — a session-only address held in local memory with no persistent public URL to crawl, categorize, or blocklist. The locally generated page registers a service worker, runs inside a sandboxed iframe, and is dynamically steered by backend infrastructure, indicating a centrally managed phishing platform. Barracuda recommends phishing-resistant MFA such as FIDO2 keys and passkeys, monitoring OAuth flows and redirect chains, and Teams malicious URL protection.
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BengalSEO Poisons Bing Search Results to Deliver MayaBot and Tech Support Scams
DFIR Report exposes BengalSEO, an India-based SEO-poisoning operation running since 2015, delivering MayaBot malware and tech support scams via Bing results.
The DFIR Report details BengalSEO, a financially motivated cluster operating from Rajasthan, India, since at least 2015, run through two IT service providers: WeConnect Solutions LLC and Garage2Global. The group uses black-hat SEO techniques—backlinks, DOM injection, DOM shuffling, keyword stuffing—to push lure pages to the top of Microsoft Bing results, routing victims through a traffic distribution system to either the custom MayaBot malware (which delivers an XMRig cryptominer and enables C2) or tech support scam call centers. A Vizio decoy page had 2,000 backlinks from 167 unique external domains, and Matomo analytics is used for victim fingerprinting, with the tracking domain appearing in 1,112 urlscan.io results.
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Gaming the system: how a Chinese-speaking actor turned Brazilian government sites into an SEO weapon
Check Point identifies Chinese-speaking group Gambling Goblin hijacking Brazilian government domains via malicious Apache modules for SEO-manipulated gambling phishing.
Check Point Research tracks a sustained campaign since mid-2025 against Brazilian government and educational organizations by Gambling Goblin, a Chinese-speaking cybercrime cluster linked to Earth Berberoka. Attackers compile and install malicious Apache modules that silently reverse-proxy visitors to phishing pages impersonating Google Play, Microsoft Store, and Amazon, chaining compromised high-reputation domains to inflate search rankings. The group deploys a heavily obfuscated Linux toolkit including DownPro, AlphaAgent, oRAT, a 3snake-based credential stealer, and SSH brute-forcers, with parallel phishing networks localized for Vietnamese, Spanish, and English victims.
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Zyxel adds enhancements and two new firewalls to its USG FLEX family of mid-range firewalls for SMBs
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