Smishing | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Threat hunters have exposed a novel campaign that makes use of search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning techniques to target employee mobile devices and facilitate payroll fraud. The activity, first detected by ReliaQuest in May 2025 targeting an unnamed customer in the manufacturing sector, is characterized by the use of fake login pages to access the employee payroll portal and redirect paychecks into accounts under the threat actor's control. "The attacker's infrastructure used compromised home office routers and mobile networks to mask their traffic, dodging detection and slipping past traditional security measures," the cybersecurity company said in an analysis published last week. "The adversary specifically targeted employee mobile devices with a fake website impersonating the organization's login page. Armed with stolen credentials, the adversary gained access to the organization's payroll portal, changed direct deposit information, and re...

The threat actors behind the Darcula phishing-as-a-service ( PhaaS ) platform have released new updates to their cybercrime suite with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) capabilities. "This addition lowers the technical barrier for creating phishing pages, enabling less tech-savvy criminals to deploy customized scams in minutes," Netcraft said in a fresh report shared with The Hacker News. "The new AI-assisted features amplify Darcula's threat potential by simplifying the process to build tailored phishing pages with multi-language support and form generation — all without any programming knowledge." Darcula was first documented by the cybersecurity company in March 2024 as a toolkit that leveraged Apple iMessage and RCS to send smishing messages to trick recipients into clicking on bogus links under the guise of postal services like USPS. Earlier this year, the operators of Darcula PhaaS began testing a major update that enabled customers to c...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a "widespread and ongoing" SMS phishing campaign that's been targeting toll road users in the United States for financial theft since mid-October 2024. "The toll road smishing attacks are being carried out by multiple financially motivated threat actors using the smishing kit developed by 'Wang Duo Yu,'" Cisco Talos researchers Azim Khodjibaev, Chetan Raghuprasad, and Joey Chen assessed with moderate confidence. The phishing campaigns , per the company, impersonate U.S. electronic toll collection systems like E-ZPass, sending SMS messages and Apple iMessages to individuals across Washington, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Illinois, and Kansas about an unpaid toll and clicking on a fake link sent in the chat. It's worth noting some aspects of the toll phishing campaign were previously highlighted by security journalist Brian Krebs in January 2025, with the activity traced back to a China-b...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malvertising campaign that's targeting Microsoft advertisers with bogus Google ads that aim to take them to phishing pages that are capable of harvesting their credentials. "These malicious ads, appearing on Google Search, are designed to steal the login information of users trying to access Microsoft's advertising platform," Jérôme Segura, senior director of research at Malwarebytes, said in a Thursday report. The findings came a few weeks after the cybersecurity company exposed a similar campaign that leveraged sponsored Google Ads to target individuals and businesses advertising via the search giant's advertising platform. The latest set of attacks targets users who search for terms like "Microsoft Ads" on Google Search, hoping to trick them into clicking on malicious links served in the form of sponsored ads in the search results pages. At the same time, the threat actors behind the campaign employ s...

Malicious Android apps masquerading as Google, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and X (formerly Twitter) have been observed to steal users' credentials from compromised devices. "This malware uses famous Android app icons to mislead users and trick victims into installing the malicious app on their devices," the SonicWall Capture Labs threat research team  said  in a recent report. The distribution vector for the campaign is currently unclear. However, once the app is installed on the users' phones, it requests them to grant it permissions to the accessibility services and the  device administrator API , a now-deprecated feature that provides device administration features at the system level. Obtaining these permissions allows the rogue app to gain control over the device, making it possible to carry out arbitrary actions ranging from data theft to malware deployment without the victims' knowledge. The malware is designed to establish connections with a comman...

A sophisticated phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform called  Darcula  has set its sights on organizations in over 100 countries by leveraging a massive network of more than 20,000 counterfeit domains to help cyber criminals launch attacks at scale. "Using iMessage and RCS rather than SMS to send text messages has the side effect of bypassing SMS firewalls, which is being used to great effect to target USPS along with postal services and other established organizations in 100+ countries," Netcraft  said . Darcula has been employed in several high-profile phishing attacks over the last year, wherein the smishing messages are sent to both Android and iOS users in the U.K., in addition to those that leverage package delivery lures by impersonating legitimate services like USPS. A Chinese-language PhaaS, Darcula is  advertised on Telegram  and offers support for  about 200 templates  impersonating legitimate brands that customers can avail for a month...

A threat actor known as  Prolific Puma  has been maintaining a low profile and operating an underground link shortening service that's offered to other threat actors for at least over the past four years. Prolific Puma creates "domain names with an  RDGA  [registered domain generation algorithm] and use these domains to provide a link shortening service to other malicious actors, helping them evade detection while they distribute phishing, scams, and malware," Infoblox  said  in a new analysis pieced together from Domain Name System ( DNS)  analytics. With malicious actors known to use link shorteners for phishing attacks, the adversary plays an important role in the cybercrime supply chain, registering between 35,000 to 75,000 unique domain names since April 2022. Prolific Puma is also a  DNS threat actor  for leveraging DNS infrastructure for nefarious purposes. A notable aspect of the threat actor's operations is the use of an American...

A Chinese-speaking phishing gang dubbed  PostalFurious  has been linked to a new SMS campaign that's targeting users in the U.A.E. by masquerading as postal services and toll operators, per Group-IB. The fraudulent scheme entails sending users bogus text messages asking them to pay a vehicle trip fee to avoid additional fines. The messages also contain a shortened URL to conceal the actual phishing link. Clicking on the link directs the unsuspecting recipients to a fake landing page that's designed to capture payment credentials and personal data. The campaign is estimated to be active as of April 15, 2023. "The URLs from the texts lead to fake branded payment pages that ask for personal details, such as name, address, and credit card information," Group-IB  said . "The phishing pages appropriate the official name and logo of the impersonated postal service provider." The exact scale of the attacks is currently unknown. What's known is that the tex...

Spain's National Police Agency, the Policía Nacional, said last week it dismantled an unnamed cybercriminal organization and arrested eight individuals in connection with a series of SIM swapping attacks that were carried out with the goal of financial fraud. The suspects of the crime ring masqueraded as trustworthy representatives of banks and other organizations and used traditional phishing and smishing techniques to obtain personal information and bank data of victims before draining money from their accounts. "They usurped the identity of their victims through the falsification of official documents and tricked employees of telephone stores into getting the duplicate of SIM cards, cards where they received security confirmation messages from banks that allowed them to empty their victims' accounts," the authorities  said . Seven of the arrests were made in Barcelona and one in Seville. As many as 12 bank accounts were frozen as part of the illicit operation....

Two different Android banking Trojans, FluBot and Medusa, are relying on the same delivery vehicle as part of a simultaneous attack campaign, according to new research published by ThreatFabric. The ongoing side-by-side infections, facilitated through the same smishing (SMS phishing) infrastructure, involved the overlapping usage of "app names, package names, and similar icons," the Dutch mobile security firm said. Medusa, first discovered targeting Turkish financial organizations in July 2020, has undergone several iterations, chief among which is the ability to abuse accessibility permissions in Android to siphon funds from banking apps to an account controlled by the attacker. "Medusa sports other dangerous features like keylogging, accessibility event logging, and audio and video streaming — all these capabilities provide actors with almost full access to [a] victim's device," the researchers  said . The malware-ridden apps used in conjunction with Flu...

Researchers from the Bitdefender Mobile Threats team said they have intercepted more than 100,000 malicious SMS messages attempting to distribute  Flubot  malware since the beginning of December. "Findings indicate attackers are modifying their subject lines and using older yet proven scams to entice users to click," the Romanian cybersecurity firm  detailed  in a report published Wednesday. "Additionally, attackers are rapidly changing the countries they are targeting in this campaign." The new wave of attacks is said to have been most active in Australia, Germany, Poland, Spain, Austria, and Italy, among others, with attacks spreading to newer countries like Romania, the Netherlands, and Thailand starting mid-January. FluBot (aka Cabassous) campaigns use smishing as the primary delivery method to target potential victims, wherein users receive an SMS message with the question "Is this you in this video?" and are tricked into clicking a link that inst...

Socially engineered SMS messages are being used to install malware on Android devices as part of a widespread phishing campaign that impersonates the Iranian government and social security services to make away with credit card details and steal funds from victims' bank accounts. Unlike other variants of  banking malware  that bank of overlay attacks to capture sensitive data without the knowledge of the victim, the financially motivated operation uncovered by Check Point Research is designed to trick the targets into handing over their credit card information by sending them a legitimate-looking SMS message that contains a link, which, when clicked, downloads a malware-laced app onto their devices. "The malicious application not only collects the victim's credit card numbers, but also gains access to their 2FA authentication SMS, and turn[s] the victim's device into a bot capable of spreading similar phishing SMS to other potential victims," Check Point resear...

Two Romanian hackers have been extradited to the United States to face 31 criminal charges including computer fraud and abuse, wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Described as "international computer hackers" by the United States Department of Justice, Teodor Laurentiu Costea , 41, and Robert Codrut Dumitrescu , 40, allegedly rob Americans of more than $18 million in an elaborate phishing scheme. Costea and Dumitrescu were named in the 31-count federal grand jury indictment on August 16 last year and were accused last week in the Northern District of Georgia following their extradition. Another co-defendant, Cosmin Draghici, 28, remains in custody in Romania awaiting his extradition to the United States. "These extraditions send a strong warning to cybercriminals and fraudsters worldwide, that we, along with our law-enforcement partners, will work tirelessly to bring you to justice," said U. S. Attorney Byung J. "BJay...

Chinese Hackers have taken Smishing attack to the next level, using rogue cell phone towers to distribute Android banking malware via spoofed SMS messages. SMiShing — phishing attacks sent via SMS — is a type of attack wherein fraudsters use number spoofing attack to send convincing bogus messages to trick mobile users into downloading a malware app onto their smartphones or lures victims into giving up sensitive information. Security researchers at Check Point Software Technologies have uncovered that Chinese hackers are using fake base transceiver stations (BTS towers) to distribute " Swearing Trojan ," an Android banking malware that once appeared neutralized after its authors were arrested in a police raid. This is the first ever reported real-world case in which criminals played smart in such a way that they used BTS — a piece of equipment usually installed on cellular telephone towers — to spread malware. The phishing SMS, which masquerades itself as the on...