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ApateWeb: An Evasive Large-Scale Scareware and PUP Delivery Campaign
Unit 42 uncovers ApateWeb, a campaign using over 130,000 domains and multilayered redirects to deliver scareware, adware and PUPs to millions of users.
Unit 42 discovered ApateWeb, a large-scale campaign using a network of more than 130,000 domains to deliver scareware, potentially unwanted programs, adware including a rogue browser and browser extensions, and scam pages. The campaign uses a three-layer structure with deceptive emails as the entry point, centralized victim tracking via UUIDs, intermediate adware or anti-bot redirections, and evasion tactics such as cloaking, bot detection error pages, and wildcard DNS abuse. Activity spiked since August 2022, with several hundred attacker-controlled sites remaining in Tranco's top 1 million rankings and millions of monthly hits; Unit 42 blocked an estimated 3.5 million sessions across 74,711 devices in November 2023.
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Phishing Attacks Abuse Trusted Email Infrastructure and URL Cloaking to Evade Security Filters
VBSpam Q3 2026 test shows phishers abusing DKIM-aligned domains, Amazon SES, and multi-stage URL cloaking to defeat email filters.
Virus Bulletin's Q3 2026 VBSpam test (AMTSO-LS1-TP207) found phishing campaigns moving payloads past the email itself via browser-fingerprinting gates, redirect chains, and hidden POST requests. Examples include a Dutch McAfee/TotalAV scareware renewal scam, a German overdue-payment Web3 fraud delivered via Amazon SES from DKIM-aligned moolaah.com, and Romanian BCR PSD2 credential phishing embedding IPv6-mapped URLs resolving to 103.193.179.223. Net at Work NoSpamProxy ranked first with a 99.995 score while open-source Rspamd caught only 62.55% of phishing mail.
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NovaCookies Campaigns Abuse Genuine Docusign Notifications to Steal Microsoft 365 Sessions
NovaCookies AitM phishing kit, a Sneaky 2FA variant, uses genuine Docusign lures to steal Microsoft 365 sessions at hundreds of organizations.
Island disclosed NovaCookies, a $320/month adversary-in-the-middle phishing-as-a-service platform that relays Microsoft 365 sign-ins through attacker infrastructure to capture credentials, MFA codes, and authenticated sessions. Campaigns abuse genuine Docusign envelopes and Microsoft/Google redirect hops so each step looks legitimate, with lure domains on .vu and alternating-case labels such as PwPt-sHaRe. Proofpoint assesses NovaCookies as a Sneaky 2FA variant with added flows for Okta and Entra domains federated to GoDaddy, and a fully managed PhaaS model. It has targeted hundreds of organizations in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, Israel, and the U.A.E., and is advertised via Telegram with anti-analysis checks like a Cloudflare gate.
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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.
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Authorities Turn Sality's P2P Network Against Itself, Cutting Off New Malware Payloads
US and European authorities with CrowdStrike dismantled the two-decade-old Sality P2P botnet using peer-list manipulation, blocking payload delivery to infected hosts.
The US Department of Justice announced a coordinated takedown of the Sality peer-to-peer botnet, executed August 31, 2026 by authorities from the US, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania with CrowdStrike and the Shadowserver Foundation. Sality, active since 2003, infects Windows executables and delivers payloads including the EggJagger crypto clipper, which stole at least $150,000, and was used for DDoS campaigns. The operation abused the botnet's peer-list maintenance cycle to insert sinkhole nodes and isolate both super peers and NAT-hidden infections, cutting off URL and payload distribution to more than 15,000 infected machines across two P2P networks.
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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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