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CategoryAllMalware 90Vulnerability 47Phishing & fraud 38Exploit / PoC 20Threat actor 15Ransomware 10Industry 6Data breach 5AI safety & security 3Research 3AI tools & infra 2Policy & legal 2AI policy 1Tools 1
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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.

Microsoft Security Blog · 12d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

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 · 11d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

Attackers conceal phishing lures using invisible Unicode characters

Threat actors use invisible Unicode characters (ASCII smuggling) to hide phishing lures and evade email security filters.

Threat actors have adopted the ASCII smuggling technique in phishing campaigns, embedding invisible Unicode characters in emails to conceal malicious lures. The approach is designed to evade email security filters that scan for visible phishing indicators. The report gives no victim counts or named campaigns.

BleepingComputer · 9d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Privileged File System Vulnerability Present in a SCADA System

Unit 42 details CVE-2025-0921 (CVSS 6.5), a privileged file operations flaw in Iconics Suite enabling DoS and privilege escalation.

Unit 42 disclosed CVE-2025-0921 (CVSS 6.5), an execution-with-unnecessary-privileges flaw in the Pager Agent of the AlarmWorX64 MMX feature of Mitsubishi Electric Iconics Digital Solutions GENESIS64. Attackers could misuse privileged file system operations to corrupt critical binaries, causing denial-of-service or integrity loss on vulnerable SCADA systems. The analysis demonstrates a chain with CVE-2024-7587, which grants excessive permissions to the C:\ProgramData\ICONICS directory via the GenBroker32 installer. Iconics released an advisory with a workaround that addresses the reported issues.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 27d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2025-0921CVE-2024-7587

In Other News: InjectEave Attack, SIM Swapper Sentenced, Glasswing Findings Review

SecurityWeek weekly roundup covers exploited WordPress Super Forms flaw CVE-2026-14894, a $10M bounty on an Iranian cyber official, InjectEave attacks, and more.

SecurityWeek's weekly roundup aggregates short items across the threat landscape, including Microsoft's report of invisible Unicode tag characters used in financial phishing lures at up to 2.37 million messages per day, and active exploitation of critical WordPress Super Forms plugin flaw CVE-2026-14894 to deploy PHP webshells. Policy items include a $10 million US bounty for IRGC-CEC Cyber Operations Command lead Amir Yaryab, a 16-month prison sentence for ex-AT&T employee Kenneth Carter over SIM swaps with nearly $600,000 in intended losses, and the US arraignment of Russian Sergei Anatolyevich Filimonov over credential harvesting. Technical items include InjectEave electromagnetic side-channel attacks tested on 11 devices, an FBI warning on OAuth consent phishing, and VulnCheck's finding that only 202 of 26,153 Anthropic Project Glasswing findings were fixed.

SecurityWeek · 4d agoIndustry in the wildCVE-2026-148942

Telegram Desktop Flaw Lets Attackers Steal Chat Messages Through Poisoned HTML Exports

Telegram Desktop XSS in bot inline keyboard buttons let attackers steal chat content from exported HTML archives; patched in 7.0.1.

ExPatch researchers Denis and Aleksander Rostilov found a stored cross-site scripting flaw in Telegram Desktop's HTML export feature, present since version 4.15.1 (March 2024). JavaScript hidden in bot inline keyboard button text executes when a user opens an exported chat HTML file with JavaScript enabled, exposing messages, metadata, and enabling DOM manipulation such as fake verification screens. Fixes shipped in Desktop Beta 6.9.4 (July 3, 2026) and Stable 7.0.1 (July 14, 2026), but previously exported HTML files remain unsafe.

Cyber Security News · 23h agoVulnerability 2 sources

Telegram Desktop Flaw Could Turn Old Chat Exports Into Data Theft Traps

ExPatch disclosed stored XSS in Telegram Desktop HTML export letting bot messages steal chat data when exports open in browsers.

ExPatch researchers Denis and Aleksander Rostilov found a stored XSS flaw (CVSS 8.2) where bot inline keyboard button text was written unescaped into HTML chat exports, executing attacker JavaScript in browsers. The payload can persist in chat history for months, exfiltrate messages, metadata, and local file paths, and rewrite the page, spreading via forwarded messages without bot membership. Telegram fixed it by applying SerializeString(), first stable fixed release 7.0.1 shipped July 14, 2026, but HTML exports created with vulnerable versions remain dangerous.

Security Affairs · 1d agoVulnerability1· 1 read

Bisonal Malware Used in Attacks Against Russia and South Korea

Unit 42 details a Bisonal malware variant, active since 2014, targeting Russian and South Korean defense organizations via PDF-disguised spearphishing emails.

In early May, Unit 42 discovered a campaign delivering a Bisonal malware variant against at least one Russian communications security and cryptography company and one unidentified organization in South Korea. The variant, in the wild since at least 2014, introduces a new C2 cipher and rewritten networking and persistence code, with only 14 samples collected to date. Attackers spoofed Russian state corporation Rostec in spearphishing emails carrying an executable disguised with a PDF icon; the dropper decrypts an RC4-encrypted DLL and establishes persistence via a registry Run key. Bisonal has been used since 2013 against government, military, and defense targets in South Korea, Russia, Japan, and India, alongside successors Bioazih and Dexbia.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoMalware in the wild

Almost Half of Malware Samples Communicate Direct to IP

Unit 42 analysis of 4 million malware reports finds 45% of C2-active samples connect directly to hard-coded IPs, bypassing DNS defenses.

Palo Alto Unit 42 analyzed over 4 million Advanced WildFire dynamic analysis reports and found that 45.32% of malware samples with C2 activity made at least one direct-to-IP connection, accounting for 23.17% of all C2 connection attempts. The firm proposes zero trust IP (ZT-IP), an enforcement approach that verifies whether outbound destinations were ever sanctioned by a DNS response. ZT-IP analysis surfaced Phorpiex ransomware droppers fetching payloads directly from C2 IPs, a persistent data exfiltration campaign using an obfuscated \GET protocol, and Mozi P2P botnet payloads delivered to IoT devices without DNS. Only 1% of benign samples connected directly to untrusted IP addresses.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch