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A widespread phishing campaign has been observed leveraging bogus PDF documents hosted on the Webflow content delivery network (CDN) with an aim to steal credit card information and commit financial fraud. "The attacker targets victims searching for documents on search engines, resulting in access to malicious PDF that contains a CAPTCHA image embedded with a phishing link, leading them to provide sensitive information," Netskope Threat Labs researcher Jan Michael Alcantara said . The activity, ongoing since the second half of 2024, entails users looking for book titles, documents, and charts on search engines like Google to redirect users to PDF files hosted on Webflow CDN. These PDF files come embedded with an image that mimics a CAPTCHA challenge, causing users who click on it to be taken to a phishing page that, this time, hosts a real Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA. In doing so, the attackers aim to lend the process a veneer of legitimacy, fooling victims into think...

Social engineering has long been an effective tactic because of how it focuses on human vulnerabilities. There's no brute-force 'spray and pray' password guessing. No scouring systems for unpatched software. Instead, it simply relies on manipulating emotions such as trust, fear, and respect for authority, usually with the goal of gaining access to sensitive information or protected systems. Traditionally that meant researching and manually engaging individual targets, which took up time and resources. However, the advent of AI has now made it possible to launch social engineering attacks in different ways, at scale, and often without psychological expertise. This article will cover five ways that AI is powering a new wave of social engineering attacks. The audio deepfake that may have influenced Slovakia elections Ahead of Slovakian parliamentary elections in 2023, a recording emerged that appeared to feature candidate Michal Simecka in conversation with a well-known journalist, M...

Privileged Access Management (PAM) has emerged as a cornerstone of modern cybersecurity strategies, shifting from a technical necessity to a critical pillar in leadership agendas. With the PAM market projected to reach $42.96 billion by 2037 (according to Research Nester), organizations invest heavily in PAM solutions. Why is PAM climbing the ranks of leadership priorities? While Gartner highlights key reasons such as enhanced security, regulatory compliance readiness, and insurance requirements, the impact of PAM extends across multiple strategic areas. PAM can help organizations enhance their overall operational efficiency and tackle many challenges they face today. To explore more about PAM's transformative impact on businesses, read The Cyber Guardian: PAM's Role in Shaping Leadership Agendas for 2025 by a renowned cybersecurity expert and former Gartner lead analyst Jonathan Care.  What cybersecurity challenges may organizations face in 2025? The cybersecurity landsca...

An international law enforcement operation has dismantled the domains associated with various online platforms linked to cybercrime such as Cracked, Nulled, Sellix, and StarkRDP. The effort, which took place between January 28 and 30, 2025, targeted the following domains - www.cracked.io www.nulled.to www.mysellix.io www.sellix.io www.starkrdp.io Visitors to these websites are now greeted by a seizure banner that says they were confiscated as part of Operation Talent that involved authorities from Australia, France, Greece, Italy, Romania, Spain, and the United States, along with Europol. "This website, as well as the information on the customers and victims of the website, has been seized by international law enforcement partners," the message reads. Operational since at 2015 and 2018, both Nulled and Cracked have been used to peddle various hack tools, such as ScrubCrypt, a malware obfuscation engine that has been observed delivering stealer malware in the pas...

Cybersecurity researchers have alerted to a new malvertising campaign that's targeting individuals and businesses advertising via Google Ads by attempting to phish for their credentials via fraudulent ads on Google. "The scheme consists of stealing as many advertiser accounts as possible by impersonating Google Ads and redirecting victims to fake login pages," Jérôme Segura, senior director of threat intelligence at Malwarebytes, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. It's suspected the end goal of the campaign is to reuse the stolen credentials to further perpetuate the campaigns, while also selling them to other criminal actors on underground forums. Based on posts shared on Reddit , Bluesky , and Google's own support forums , the threat has been active since at least mid-November 2024. The activity cluster is a lot similar to campaigns that leverage stealer malware to steal data related to Facebook advertising and business accounts in order to ...

The Telegram-based online marketplace known as HuiOne Guarantee and its vendors have cumulatively received at least $24 billion in cryptocurrency, dwarfing the now-defunct Hydra to become the largest online illicit marketplace to have ever operated. The figures, released by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, show that monthly inflows have increased by 51% since July 2024. Huione Guarantee, part of the HuiOne Group of companies, came under spotlight mid-last year when it was exposed as a hub for online fraudsters, advertising money laundering services, stolen data, and even electrified shackles meant for use against people who are trafficked into scam compounds under the pretext of high paying jobs to conduct romance baiting scams . The development led to cryptocurrency company Tether freezing $29.62 million of its stablecoin connected to the marketplace. Established in 2021 ostensibly to facilitate the sale of cars and real estate, it's said to have strong links with Camb...

Europol on Thursday announced the shutdown of a clearnet marketplace called Manson Market that facilitated online fraud on a large scale. The operation, led by German authorities, has resulted in the seizure of more than 50 servers associated with the service and the arrest of two suspects. More than 200 terabytes of digital evidence have been collected. In addition, over 80 data storage devices, cell phones, computers, as well as cash and crypto assets worth more than €63,000 ($66,500) have been confiscated. Manson Market ("manson-market[.]pw") is believed to have launched in 2022 as a way to peddle sensitive information that was illegally obtained from victims as part of phishing and vishing (voice phishing) schemes. One such criminal activity involved calling victims under the guise of bank employees to trick them into revealing their addresses and security answers. In another instance, a network of fake online shops was employed to deceive visitors into entering th...

A new phishing campaign is targeting e-commerce shoppers in Europe and the United States with bogus pages that mimic legitimate brands with the goal of stealing their personal information ahead of the Black Friday shopping season. "The campaign leveraged the heightened online shopping activity in November, the peak season for Black Friday discounts. The threat actor used fake discounted products as phishing lures to deceive victims into providing their Cardholder Data (CHD) and Sensitive Authentication Data (SAD) and Personally Identifiable Information (PII)," EclecticIQ said . The activity, first observed in early October 2024, has been attributed with high confidence to a Chinese financially motivated threat actor codenamed SilkSpecter. Some of the impersonated brands include IKEA, L.L.Bean, North Face, and Wayfare. The phishing domains have been found to use top-level domains (TLDs) such as .top, .shop, .store, and .vip, often typosquatting legitimate e-commerce organi...

Multiple threat actors have been found taking advantage of an attack technique called Sitting Ducks to hijack legitimate domains for using them in phishing attacks and investment fraud schemes for years. The findings come from Infoblox, which said it identified nearly 800,000 vulnerable registered domains over the past three months, of which approximately 9% (70,000) have been subsequently hijacked. "Cybercriminals have used this vector since 2018 to hijack tens of thousands of domain names," the cybersecurity company said in a deep-dive report shared with The Hacker News. "Victim domains include well-known brands, non-profits, and government entities." The little-known attack vector, although originally documented by security researcher Matthew Bryant way back in 2016, didn't attract a lot of attention until the scale of the hijacks was disclosed earlier this August. "I believe there is more awareness [since then]," Dr. Renee Burton, vice pre...

As the holiday season approaches, retail businesses are gearing up for their annual surge in online (and in-store) traffic. Unfortunately, this increase in activity also attracts cybercriminals looking to exploit vulnerabilities for their gain.  Imperva, a Thales company, recently published its annual holiday shopping cybersecurity guide . Data from the Imperva Threat Research team's six-month analysis (April 2024 – September 2024) revealed that AI-driven threats need to be top of mind for retailers this year. As generative AI tools and large language models (LLMs) become more widespread and advanced, cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging these technologies to scale and refine their attacks on eCommerce platforms. Imperva Threat Research also found that retail sites collectively experience an average of 569,884 AI-driven attacks each day. Understanding what types of threats are accounting for these attacks, and how to protect against them, is critical for retail businesses ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new phishing kit that has been put to use in campaigns targeting Australia, Japan, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. since at least September 2024. Netcraft said more than 2,000 phishing websites have been identified the kit, known as Xiū gǒu, with the offering used in attacks aimed at a variety of verticals, such as public sectors, postal, digital services, and banking services. "Threat actors using the kit to deploy phishing websites often rely on Cloudflare's anti-bot and hosting obfuscation capabilities to prevent detection," Netcraft said in a report published Thursday. Some aspects of the phishing kit were documented by security researchers Will Thomas (@ BushidoToken) and Fox_threatintel (@banthisguy9349) in September 2024. Phishing kits like Xiū gǒu pose a risk because they could lower the barrier of entry for less skilled hackers, potentially leading to an increase in malicious campaigns that could lead to theft of ...

A new tax-themed malware campaign targeting insurance and finance sectors has been observed leveraging GitHub links in phishing email messages as a way to bypass security measures and deliver Remcos RAT, indicating that the method is gaining traction among threat actors. "In this campaign, legitimate repositories such as the open-source tax filing software, UsTaxes, HMRC, and InlandRevenue were used instead of unknown, low-star repositories," Cofense researcher Jacob Malimban said . "Using trusted repositories to deliver malware is relatively new compared to threat actors creating their own malicious GitHub repositories. These malicious GitHub links can be associated with any repository that allows comments." Central to the attack chain is the abuse of GitHub infrastructure for staging the malicious payloads. One variation of the technique, first disclosed by OALABS Research in March 2024, involves threat actors opening a GitHub issue on well-known repositories...

The Dutch police have announced the takedown of Bohemia and Cannabia, which has been described as the world's largest and longest-running dark web market for illegal goods, drugs, and cybercrime services. The takedown is the result of a collaborative investigation with Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States that began towards the end of 2022, the Politie said. The marketplace discontinued its operations in late 2023 following reports of service disruptions and exit scams after one of its developers allegedly went rogue in what was characterized by one of the administrators as a "shameful and disgruntled set of events." Bohemia is said to have served 82,000 ads worldwide every day, with about 67,000 transactions taking place each month. In September 2023 alone, the estimated turnover was €12 million. "Some of the sellers in the market advertised shipping from the Netherlands," the Politie said . "An initial analysis shows that at least 14...

Is your store at risk? Discover how an innovative web security solution saved one global online retailer and its unsuspecting customers from an "evil twin" disaster. Read the full real-life case study here . The Invisible Threat in Online Shopping When is a checkout page, not a checkout page? When it's an "evil twin"! Malicious redirects can send unsuspecting shoppers to these perfect-looking fake checkout pages and steal their payment information, so could your store be at risk too? Discover how an innovative web security solution saved one global online retailer and its unsuspecting customers from an "evil twin" disaster. (You can read the full case study here ) Anatomy of an Evil Twin Attack In today's fast-paced world of online shopping, convenience often trumps caution. Shoppers quickly move through product selection to checkout, rarely scrutinizing the process. This lack of attention creates an opportunity for cybercriminals to exploit. The Deceptive Redirect The ...

INTERPOL has announced the arrest of eight individuals in Côte d'Ivoire and Nigeria as part of a crackdown on phishing scams and romance cyber fraud. Dubbed Operation Contender 2.0, the initiative is designed to tackle cyber-enabled crimes in West Africa, the agency said. One such threat involved a large-scale phishing scam targeting Swiss citizens that resulted in financial losses to the tune of more than $1.4 million. The cybercriminals posed as buyers on small advertising websites and used QR codes to direct victims to fraudulent websites that mimicked a legitimate payment platform. This allowed victims to inadvertently enter personal information such as their credentials or card numbers. The perpetrators also impersonated the unnamed platform's customer service agents over the phone to further deceive them. As many as 260 scam reports are said to have been received by Swiss authorities between August 2023 and April 2024, prompting a collaborative investigation that ...