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:
- New spyware found to be snooping on thousands of Android and iOS users
February 28, 2025
Hundreds of thousands of Android users, as well as several thousand iPhone users, have had their sensitive data compromised by a spouseware app, called Spyzie. The apps were found leaking email addresses, text messages, call logs, photographs, and other sensitive data, belonging to millions of people who, without their knowledge or consent, have had these apps ...
- Cyber Attack Keeps Cleveland Municipal Court Offline
February 28, 2025
Cleveland Municipal Court will remain closed Thursday, four days after officials announced a cyber attack against the court. The court has been closed since Monday. All internal systems and software, including the court’s website, have been shut down and will remain offline as authorities work to figure out what happened and the best time to restore ...
- JavaGhost’s Persistent Phishing Attacks From the Cloud
February 28, 2025
Unit 42 researchers have observed phishing activity that we track as TGR-UNK-0011. They assess with high confidence that this cluster overlaps with the threat actor group JavaGhost. The threat actor group JavaGhost has been active for over five years and continues to target cloud environments to send out phishing campaigns to unsuspecting targets. According to website ...
- UK: Cyber-attack sparks security fears over NHS provider’s data
February 28, 2025
The private healthcare group that will soon take charge of Swindon community care services has been hit by a cyber-attack. HCRG Care Group recently won the contract to provide care-at-home services in the Swindon area, which was previously managed by the trust in charge of Great Western Hospital, as well as other parts of Wiltshire. The company ...
- Winos 4.0 Spreads via Impersonation of Official Email to Target Users in Taiwan
February 27, 2025
In January 2025, FortiGuard Labs observed an attack that used Winos4.0, an advanced malware framework actively used in recent threat campaigns, to target companies in Taiwan. According to a report released in November 2024, Winos4.0 was distributed through gaming-related applications, however, it spread via an email masquerading as from Taiwan’s National Taxation Bureau in the campaign ...
- PayPal’s “no-code checkout” abused by scammers
February 27, 2025
Malwarebytes Labs recently identified a new scam targeting PayPal customers with very convincing ads and pages. Crooks are abusing both Google and PayPal’s infrastructure in order to trick victims calling for assistance to speak with fraudsters instead. Combining official-looking Google search ads with specially-crafted PayPal pay links, makes this scheme particularly dangerous on mobile devices due ...