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:
- Western Sydney University staff, students caught in cyber attack
May 21, 2024
About 7500 staff and students have been caught up in a massive cyber attack at Western Sydney University. Police are investigating the breach, which the university says dates as far back as May 2023, when an unauthorised party got into the Microsoft Office system and accessed email accounts and SharePoint files. WSU says they have not ...
- Deepfake video conference sees criminals escape with US$25 million
May 20, 2024
In February, a multinational company’s finance team member in Hong Kong made headlines after he transmitted HK$200 million (US$25 million) to cybercriminals who pretended to be the chief financial officer and other colleagues, using deepfake technology, in what the worker thought was a legitimate video conference. Now it’s been revealed that it was UK engineering group ...
- Medusa announced attack on John R. Wood Christie’s International Real Estate group
May 20, 2024
No patron information was compromised in a recent ransomware attack against John R. Wood Christie’s International Real Estate by a cyber gang known as Medusa, according to the company. Medusa announced the attack on its site, claiming it had stolen more than 1 terabyte of Wood data. The gang demanded $2 million from the real estate ...
- Springtail: New Linux Backdoor Added to Toolkit
May 16, 2024
Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team has uncovered a new Linux backdoor developed by the North Korean Springtail espionage group (aka Kimsuky) that is linked to malware used in a recent campaign against organizations in South Korea. The backdoor (Linux.Gomir) appears to be a Linux version of the GoBear backdoor, which was used in a recent Springtail campaign ...
- Payload Trends in Malicious OneNote Samples
May 16, 2024
In this post, Unt 42 researchers look at the types of embedded payloads that attackers leverage to abuse Microsoft OneNote files. Our analysis of roughly 6,000 malicious OneNote samples from WildFire reveals that these samples have a phishing-like theme where attackers use one or more images to lure people into clicking or interacting with OneNote ...
- Scammers can easily phish your multi-factor authentication codes – here’s how to avoid it
May 16, 2024
More and more websites and services are making multi-factor-authentication (MFA) mandatory, which makes it much harder for cybercriminals to access your accounts. That’s a great thing. But as security evolves, so do cybercriminals who are always looking for new ways to scam us. A type of phishing we’re calling authentication-in-the-middle is showing up in online media. ...