Threat actors are increasingly improving their tactics to make suspicious emails look like legitimate email notifications to potential victims, deploying techniques that impersonate internally sent emails from executive team members. While this technique is not new, the adoption of AI has enabled threat actors to improve their campaign templates and construct emails tailored to their recipients. Additionally, threat actors are incorporating multiple techniques within the same email to improve the overall narrative further.
In this blog, we will discuss a recent campaign observed using third-party email delivery infrastructure to send out over a million financial fraud scam emails that displayed multiple indicators consistent with the use of generative AI during email template creation. The threat actor impersonated CEOs of multiple target companies, attempting to convince accounts payable departments of the same companies to process an Automated Clearing House (ACH) payment of nearly $50,000. To add legitimacy, the actor included a forwarded email thread (and a fabricated invoice) between the impersonated CEO and ServiceNow (which was also being impersonated).
Read more…
Source: Microsoft News
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- UK: Arrests made after M&S, Co-op and Harrods cyber attacks
July 10, 2025
Four people, including three teenagers and a 20-year-old woman, have been arrested in connection with a wave of cyber attacks that crippled M&S, the Co-op and Harrods. The group allegedly unleashed ransomware that stole millions of customer records, shut down online orders and left supermarket shelves bare. The arrests included a 17-year-old British man from the ...
- GoldMelody’s Hidden Chords: Initial Access Broker In-Memory IIS Modules Revealed
July 8, 2025
Unit 42 researchers uncovered a campaign by an initial access broker (IAB) to exploit leaked Machine Keys — cryptographic keys used on ASP.NET sites — to gain access to targeted organizations. IABs breach organizations and then sell that access to other threat actors. This report analyzes the tools used in these attacks. Palo Alto track this ...
- Impostor uses AI to impersonate Rubio and contact foreign and US officials
July 8, 2025
The State Department is warning U.S. diplomats of attempts to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio and possibly other officials using technology driven by artificial intelligence, according to two senior officials and a cable sent last week to all embassies and consulates. The warning came after the department discovered that an impostor posing as Rubio had ...
- NFC fraud threatens Philippines digital payments security
July 8, 2025
As contactless payments and digital wallets grow quickly in the Philippines, cyber-criminals are now targeting the country by abusing Near Field Communication (NFC) technologies. Resecurity, a global leader in cyber threat intelligence, issued a stark warning, urging Philippine regulators and financial institutions to heighten their defenses amid an alarming increase in NFC-enabled fraud, particularly from ...
- Batavia spyware steals data from Russian organizations
July 7, 2025
Since early March 2025, our systems have recorded an increase in detections of similar files with names like договор-2025-5.vbe, приложение.vbe, and dogovor.vbe (translation: contract, attachment) among employees at various Russian organizations. The targeted attack begins with bait emails containing malicious links, sent under the pretext of signing a contract. The campaign began in July 2024 and ...
- BERT Ransomware Group Targets Asia and Europe on Multiple Platforms
July 7, 2025
In April, a new ransomware group known as BERT, has been observed targeting organizations across Asia and Europe. TrendResearch telemetry has confirmed the emergence and activity of this ransomware. This blog entry examines BERT’s tools and tactics across multiple variants. By comparing its different iterations, we unpack how the ransomware group operates, how their methods have ...