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:
- Indian Startup Develops a Next-Gen Cybersecurity Solution on the Blockchain
March 26, 2017
A new innovative prototype startup powered by blockchain technology for cybersecurity has recently launched in India aimed at curbing the global phenomenon of cybercrime. Mumbai-based Block Armour was thought up by Narayan Neelakantan, former CISO and Head of IT Risk and Compliance with India’s National Stock Exchange (NSE) and Floyd DCosta, who has a background in ...
- Apple Pressured to Pay Ransom by Hackers Threatening to Remotely Wipe iPhones
March 22, 2017
Apple is currently under pressure to pay a ransom to a group of hackers who are threatening to remotely wipe iPhones. It seems the hackers are identifying themselves as “Turkish Crime Family.” Taking into account just how big Apple is and how deep its pockets go, the hackers only demanded $75,000 in Bitcoin or Ethereum, another ...
- New Spam Campaign via Necurs Botnet Tries to Manipulate the Stock Market
March 21, 2017
The Necurs botnet is known as the largest spam botnet in the world, particularly for distributing Locky ransomware and Dridex. Now, it looks like Necurs is taking on a new role as someone tries to manipulate the stock market. The discovery was made by Cisco’s threat intelligence organization Talos, which notes that after being offline for ...
- Cyber Firm at Center of Russian Hacking Charges Misread Data
March 21, 2017
An influential British think tank and Ukraine’s military are disputing a report that the U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has used to buttress its claims of Russian hacking in the presidential election. The CrowdStrike report, released in December, asserted that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app, resulting in heavy losses of howitzers in Ukraine’s war with ...
- Personalized spam campaign targets Germany
March 20, 2017
A spam campaign Symantec observed in January 2017 targeting people who live in Germany appears to be, once again, using detailed, real personal information to enhance the believability of the messages. Victims who open the message attachments are likely to have their Windows computers infected with malware that steals banking information. First seen in the UK Symantec ...
- Cybercriminals getting as good as nation state spies – report
March 14, 2017
The European energy sector is being targeted by advanced threat actors seeking proprietary information to advance the capabilities of domestic companies, according to FireEye Mandiant. The latest annual report by FireEye’s incident response arm further warns that cyber threat groups are also targeting European industrial control systems for potentially disruptive or destructive operations. The capability of cybercriminals ...