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:
- Newely discovered AMD CPU flaw highlights the risk of running multiple VMs
January 16, 2026
A newly discovered vulnerability in AMD chips allows malicious actors to perform remote code execution (RCE) and privilege escalation in virtual machines. Cybersecurity researchers from the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany detailed a vulnerability they named StackWarp, a hardware vulnerability in AMD CPUs that breaks the protections of confidential virtual machines, by manipulating ...
- RondoDox botnet linked to large-scale exploit of critical HPE OneView bug
January 16, 2026
A critical HPE OneView flaw is now being exploited at scale, with Check Point tying mass, automated attacks to the RondoDox botnet. The security outfit says it has identified “large-scale exploitation” of CVE-2025-37164, a maximum-severity remote code execution bug in HPE’s data center management platform. Check Point has tied the activity to RondoDox, a Linux-based botnet ...
- WhisperPair exposes Bluetooth earbuds and headphones to tracking and eavesdropping
January 16, 2026
WhisperPair is a set of attacks that lets an attacker hijack many popular Bluetooth audio accessories that use Google Fast Pair and, in some cases, even track their location via Google’s Find Hub network—all without requiring any user interaction. Researchers at the Belgian University of Leuven revealed a collection of vulnerabilities they found in audio accessories ...
- German police add Black Basta boss to EU most-wanted list
January 16, 2026
German cops have added Russian national Oleg Evgenievich Nefekov to their list of most-wanted criminals for his services to ransomware. Nefekov, 35, is accused of spearheading the Black Basta ransomware operation, which suffered a similar fate as Conti last year – ceasing activity after a major internal leak. His name and face also now appear ...
- Cisco has finally patched a maximum-level security issue
January 16, 2026
A maximum-severity vulnerability in certain Cisco products has finally been addressed after allegedly being exploited by Chinese hackers for several weeks. In mid-December 2025, the networking giant disclosed a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in AsyncOS that affects Secure Email Gateway (SEG) and Secure Email and Web Manager (SEWM) appliances. It tracked the flaw as CVE-2025-20393 ...
- “Reprompt” attack lets attackers steal data from Microsoft Copilot
January 15, 2026
Researchers found a method to steal data which bypasses Microsoft Copilot’s built-in safety mechanisms. The attack flow, called Reprompt, abuses how Microsoft Copilot handled URL parameters in order to hijack a user’s existing Copilot Personal session. Copilot is an AI assistant which connects to a personal account and is integrated into Windows, the Edge browser, and ...