TrendAI™ Research tracked a sustained malvertising campaign that abused Google Ads to deliver ClickFix social engineering attacks disguised as popular AI developer tools. The campaign impersonated at least six legitimate brand names, including ChatGPT Codex, Perplexity, Cursor IDE, JetBrains, Claude AI, and claude.ai, and simultaneously ran Mac utility scam lures.
By leveraging paid search ads targeting users actively seeking AI development tools, the attackers were able to target technically proficient users who are more likely to interact with command-line instructions without suspicion. This marks a sophisticated evolution of the ClickFix social engineering technique, where victims are tricked into manually executing malicious commands, typically by copying and pasting PowerShell or terminal commands under the guise of “fixing” a problem or completing a software installation.
Read more…
Source: Trend Micro
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Engineer IMI becomes latest British firm to be hit by cyber attack
February 6, 2025
Engineering group IMI confirmed it had been hit by a cyber attack just a week after rival Smiths Group said hackers had gained access to its global systems. Birmingham-headquartered IMI declined to disclose what data had been accessed in the attack, but systems in a number of its locations globally are understood to have been hit. IMI ...
- Grubhub confirms data breach, both drivers and customers are affected
February 4, 2025
Grubhub, the food delivery service, has been hacked. On Monday, the company confirmed a data breach that affects both its drivers and customers. According to Grubhub, the malicious actor was able to gain entry into its systems via a third-party vendor that provides services for Grubhub’s support team. The hacker was able to access private information connected ...
- Deloitte to provide Rhode Island $5 million toward data breach aftermath expense
February 4, 2025
Deloitte will provide Rhode Island with $5 million to go toward paying expenses related to the RIBridges data breach that took place in December of 2024. Separately, Deloitte will also cover the cost of the data breach call center, credit monitoring for affected Rhode Islanders and identity protection, according to a statement from Rhode Island Governor ...
- CVE-2025-0411: Ukrainian Organizations Targeted in Zero-Day Campaign and Homoglyph Attacks
February 4, 2025
In September, 2024 the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) Threat Hunting team identified the exploitation of a 7-Zip zero-day vulnerability used in a SmokeLoader malware campaign targeting Ukrainian entities. The vulnerability, CVE-2025-0411, was disclosed to 7-Zip creator Igor Pavlov, leading to the release of a patch in version 24.09 on November 30, 2024. CVE-2025-0411 allows the bypassing ...
- Funksec Ransomware Teams Up with Another Ransomware Group to Double Down on Targets
February 3, 2025
FunkSec is a relatively new but highly active ransomware group that, as of this writing, has targeted several dozen victims across industries like government, banking, communications, and education. In a recent blog post, the group announced a partnership with another ransomware outfit, FSociety, aiming to carry out attacks more efficiently. This week, SonicWall Capture Labs research ...
- Malicious packages deepseeek and deepseekai published in Python Package Index
February 2, 2025
As part of their research and monitoring efforts, the Supply Chain Security team of the Threat Intelligence department of the Positive Technologies Expert Security Center (PT ESC) detected and prevented a malicious campaign in the Python Package Index (PyPI) package repository. The attack targeted developers, ML engineers, and ordinary AI enthusiasts who might be interested in ...