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:
- FBI, cybersecurity firms say a prolific hacking crew is now targeting airlines and the transportation sector
June 28, 2025
The FBI and cybersecurity firms are warning that the prolific hacking group known as Scattered Spider is now targeting airlines and the transportation sector. In a brief statement on Friday shared with TechCrunch, the FBI said it had “recently observed” cyberattacks resembling Scattered Spider to include the airline sector. Executives from Google’s cybersecurity unit Mandiant and ...
- AI Goes on Offense: How LLMs Are Redefining the Cybercrime Landscape
June 26, 2025
In their last blog, Rapid7 explored the broader rise of AI-enabled threats across ransomware, phishing, and nation-state operations. Now, they’re narrowing in on a specific piece of that evolution: how cybercriminals are using large language models to scale and automate their tactics. AI in cybersecurity is no longer experimental. It’s embedded in workflows, transforming everything from ...
- US, French authorities confirm arrest of BreachForums hackers
June 26, 2025
U.S. and French authorities have confirmed the arrests of five hackers accused of being behind several major hacks and being part of a notorious cybercrime forum. On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the indictment of British national Kai West, 25, accusing him of being “a serial hacker” known as IntelBroker. U.S. authorities allege West ...
- Cisco Releases Security Advisory Affecting Cisco Identity Service Engine
June 26, 2025
Cisco has released a security advisory addressing two vulnerabilities, affecting Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Cisco ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) . CVE-2025-20281 Cisco ISE API Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2025-20281 is an ‘API unauthenticated remote code execution’ vulnerability with a CVSSv3 score of 9.8. Successful exploitation could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to ...
- Windows users warned of new ClickFlix-style social engineering attack
June 26, 2025
A new version of popular social engineering tool ClickFix has been developed, potentially putting Windows users at risk. A cybersecurity researcher who goes by the name mr. dox has developed a new version of ClickFix, a browser-based attack often disguised as captchas to trick victims into pressing a button which then copies a command to Windows ...
- Jailbroken AIs are helping cybercriminals to hone their craft
June 26, 2025
Cybercriminals are bypassing the guardrails that are supposed to keep AI models from carrying out criminal activities, according to researchers. We’ve seen the misuse of AI models by cybercriminals growing rapidly over the past several years, shaping a new era of digital threats. Early on, attackers focused on jailbreaking public AI chatbots, which meant they used ...