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A multi-pronged phishing campaign is targeting Spanish-speaking users in organizations across Latin America and Europe to deliver Windows banking trojans like Casbaneiro (aka Metamorfo) via another malware called Horabot . The activity has been attributed to a Brazilian cybercrime threat actor tracked as Augmented Marauder and Water Saci . The e-crime group was first documented by Trend Micro in October 2025. "This threat group employs a wider-ranging attack model focused on a bespoke delivery and propagation mechanism that includes WhatsApp, ClickFix techniques, and email-centric phishing," BlueVoyant security researchers Thomas Elkins and Joshua Green said in a technical breakdown published Tuesday. "It is now evident that while these Brazil-based operators heavily leverage script-based WhatsApp automation to compromise retail and consumer users in Latin America, they concurrently maintain and deploy an advanced, email-hijacking engine to penetrate enterprise ...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about a spike in email phishing campaigns that are weaponizing the Google Cloud Run service to deliver various banking trojans such as  Astaroth  (aka Guildma),  Mekotio , and  Ousaban  (aka Javali) to targets across Latin America (LATAM) and Europe. "The infection chains associated with these malware families feature the use of malicious Microsoft Installers (MSIs) that function as droppers or downloaders for the final malware payload(s)," Cisco Talos researchers  disclosed  last week. The high-volume malware distribution campaigns, observed since September 2023, have employed the same storage bucket within Google Cloud for propagation, suggesting potential links between the threat actors behind the distribution campaigns. Google Cloud Run is a  managed compute platform  that enables users to run frontend and backend services, batch jobs, deploy websites and applications, and queue processing workloa...

A now-patched security flaw in Google Chrome was exploited as a zero-day by a threat actor known as TaxOff to deploy a backdoor codenamed Trinper . The attack, observed in mid-March 2025 by Positive Technologies, involved the use of a sandbox escape vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-2783 (CVSS score: 8.3). Google addressed the flaw later that month after Kaspersky reported in-the-wild exploitation in a campaign dubbed Operation ForumTroll targeting various Russian organizations. "The initial attack vector was a phishing email containing a malicious link," security researchers Stanislav Pyzhov and Vladislav Lunin said . "When the victim clicked the link, it triggered a one-click exploit (CVE-2025-2783), leading to the installation of the Trinper backdoor employed by TaxOff." The phishing email is said to have been disguised as an invitation to the Primakov Readings forum – the same lure detailed by Kaspersky – urging users to click on a link that led to a fake...

In what has been described as an "extremely sophisticated phishing attack," threat actors have leveraged an uncommon approach that allowed bogus emails to be sent via Google's infrastructure and redirect message recipients to fraudulent sites that harvest their credentials. "The first thing to note is that this is a valid, signed email – it really was sent from no-reply@google.com," Nick Johnson, the lead developer of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), said in a series of posts on X. "It passes the DKIM signature check, and Gmail displays it without any warnings – it even puts it in the same conversation as other, legitimate security alerts." The email message informs prospective targets of a subpoena from a law enforcement authority asking for unspecified content present in their Google Account and urges them to click on a sites.google[.]com URL in order to "examine the case materials or take measures to submit a protest." The Google Si...

Cybersecurity researchers are drawing attention to a new campaign that's using legitimate generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered website building tools like DeepSite AI and BlackBox AI to create replica phishing pages mimicking Brazilian government agencies as part of a financially motivated campaign. The activity involves the creation of lookalike sites imitating Brazil's State Department of Traffic and Ministry of Education, which then trick unsuspecting users into making unwarranted payments through the country's PIX payment system, Zscaler ThreatLabz said. These fraudulent sites are artificially boosted using search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning techniques to enhance their visibility, thereby increasing the likelihood of success of the attack. "Source code analysis reveals signatures of generative AI tools, such as overly explanatory comments meant to guide developers, non-functional elements that would typically work on an authentic website, and...

A threat actor possibly of Russian origin has been attributed to a new set of attacks targeting the energy sector in Kazakhstan. The activity, codenamed Operation BarrelFire, is tied to a new threat group tracked by Seqrite Labs as Noisy Bear. The threat actor has been active since at least April 2025. "The campaign is targeted towards employees of KazMunaiGas or KMG where the threat entity delivered a fake document related to the KMG IT department, mimicking official internal communication and leveraging themes such as policy updates, internal certification procedures, and salary adjustments," security researcher Subhajeet Singha said . The infection chain begins with a phishing email containing a ZIP attachment, which includes a Windows shortcut (LNK) downloader, a decoy document related to KazMunaiGas, and a README.txt file with instructions written in both Russian and Kazakh to run a program named "KazMunayGaz_Viewer." The email, per the cybersecurity compa...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to the "democratization" of the phishing ecosystem owing to the emergence of Telegram as an epicenter for cybercrime, enabling threat actors to mount a mass attack for as little as $230. "This messaging app has transformed into a bustling hub where seasoned cybercriminals and newcomers alike exchange illicit tools and insights creating a dark and well-oiled supply chain of tools and victims' data," Guardio Labs researchers Oleg Zaytsev and Nati Tal  said  in a new report. "Free samples, tutorials, kits, even hackers-for-hire – everything needed to construct a complete end-to-end malicious campaign." The company also described Telegram as a "scammers paradise" and a "breeding ground for modern phishing operations." This is not the first time the popular messaging platform has  come under the radar  for facilitating malicious activities, which are in part driven by its lenient modera...

Phishing attacks have become one of the business world's top cybersecurity concerns. These social engineering attacks have been rising over the years, with the most recent report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group coalition identifying over 266,000 active spoofed websites, which is nearly double the number detected during Q4 2018. Hackers have evolved their methods, from regular phishing attacks to spear phishing, where they use email messages disguised as coming from legitimate sources to dupe specific individuals. This is why the global spear phishing protection software market is estimated to reach $1.8 billion by 2025. However, conventional defenses can still fall short due to one particular weakness in the security perimeter – the human factor. Indeed, some 33 percent of 2019's data breaches involved humans falling victim to social engineering attacks. And given how sophisticated and creative the phishing perpetrators have been getting, it's easy to see h...

Various industrial organizations in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region have been targeted as part of phishing attacks designed to deliver a known malware called FatalRAT. "The threat was orchestrated by attackers using legitimate Chinese cloud content delivery network (CDN) myqcloud and the Youdao Cloud Notes service as part of their attack infrastructure," Kaspersky ICS CERT said in a Monday report. "The attackers employed a sophisticated multi-stage payload delivery framework to ensure evasion of detection." The activity has singled out government agencies and industrial organizations, particularly manufacturing, construction, information technology, telecommunications, healthcare, power and energy, and large-scale logistics and transportation, in Taiwan, Malaysia, China, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. The lure attachments used in the email messages suggest that the phishing campaign, dubbed Operation SalmonSla...

A previously undocumented malware called SambaSpy is exclusively targeting users in Italy via a phishing campaign orchestrated by a suspected Brazilian Portuguese-speaking threat actor. "Threat actors usually try to cast a wide net to maximize their profits, but these attackers are focused on just one country," Kaspersky said in a new analysis. "It's likely that the attackers are testing the waters with Italian users before expanding their operation to other countries." The starting point of the attack is a phishing email that either includes an HTML attachment or an embedded link that initiates the infection process. Should the HTML attachment be opened, a ZIP archive containing an interim downloader or dropper is used to deploy and launch the multi-functional RAT payload. The downloader, for its part, is responsible for fetching the malware from a remote server. The dropper, on the other hand, does the same thing, but extracts the payload from the archive...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a surge in "mass scanning, credential brute-forcing, and exploitation attempts" originating from IP addresses associated with a Russian bulletproof hosting service provider named Proton66 . The activity, detected since January 8, 2025, targeted organizations worldwide, according to a two-part analysis published by Trustwave SpiderLabs last week.  "Net blocks 45.135.232.0/24 and 45.140.17.0/24 were particularly active in terms of mass scanning and brute-force attempts," security researchers Pawel Knapczyk and Dawid Nesterowicz said . "Several of the offending IP addresses were not previously seen to be involved in malicious activity or were inactive for over two years." The Russian autonomous system Proton66 is assessed to be linked to another autonomous system named PROSPERO. Last year, French security firm Intrinsec detailed their connections to bulletproof services marketed on Russian cybercrime forums under ...

Microsoft is warning of a new phishing campaign undertaken by an initial access broker that involves using Teams messages as lures to infiltrate corporate networks. The tech giant's Threat Intelligence team is tracking the cluster under the name  Storm-0324 , which is also known by the monikers TA543 and Sagrid. "Beginning in July 2023, Storm-0324 was observed distributing payloads using an open-source tool to send phishing lures through Microsoft Teams chats," the company  said , adding the development marks a shift from using email-based initial infection vectors for initial access. Storm-0324 operates in the cybercriminal economy as a payload distributor, offering a service that allows for the propagation of  various   payloads  using evasive infection chains. This includes a mix of downloaders, banking trojans, ransomware, and modular toolkits such as Nymaim, Gozi, TrickBot, IcedID, Gootkit, Dridex, Sage, GandCrab, and JSSLoader. Attack sequences mounte...

Retail banking institutions in Singapore have three months to phase out the use of one-time passwords (OTPs) for authentication purposes when signing into online accounts to mitigate the risk of phishing attacks. The decision was announced by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) on July 9, 2024. "Customers who have activated their digital token on their mobile device will have to use their digital tokens for bank account logins via the browser or the mobile banking app," the MAS said . "The digital token will authenticate customers’ login without the need for an OTP that scammers can steal, or trick customers into disclosing." The MAS is also urging customers to activate their digital tokens to safeguard against attacks that are designed to steal credentials and hijack their accounts for conducting financial fraud. "This measure provides customers with further protection against unauthorized access to ...