AI tools are drastically improving the speed of the reconnaissance stage of targeted social engineering attacks, according to researchers at ESET. Attackers can use these tools to trawl the internet for publicly available information about potential victims, and incorporate this information into personalized spear phishing attacks.
Attackers have used a new phishing platform called “BigBear 2.0” to target hundreds of organizations across more than forty countries, according to researchers at CloudSEK. In about 10% of cases, the phishing attacks were able to bypass multifactor authentication.
Researchers at Microsoft are tracking a social engineering campaign that uses passkey-themed lures to trick users into granting persistent access to their accounts and online work environments.
Threat actors are using phishing emails with blank SMTP sender fields to bypass Microsoft 365 security filters, according to researchers at ReliaQuest.
Microsoft 365 Exchange Online uses a feature called “RejectDirectSend” to block unauthenticated Direct Send emails from an organization’s trusted domain. If an attacker omits the domain field from these emails, however, RejectDirectSend will no longer block the messages. Attackers can therefore exploit this technique to impersonate internal users.
Researchers at Gen Digital are tracking a sophisticated social engineering campaign that’s using phony NDA documents to trick employees into moving the conversation to WhatsApp and personal email accounts. The attackers targeted an employee at Gen itself, but the employee recognized that it was a scam and played along to see what the attackers would do.
Threat actors are increasingly leveraging AI hallucinations to plant phishing links and other malicious content in AI output, IEEE Spectrum reports. Large language models (LLMs) sometimes fabricate information, including web domains, when answering users’ questions. Attackers are registering these hallucinated web domains to host phishing pages.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued an advisory warning of a wave of OAuth consent phishing attacks targeting “prominent victims, their family members, and personal acquaintances.”
OAuth phishing is an increasingly popular social engineering tactic that tricks users into granting access to their accounts without handing over their passwords.
A recent survey from Experian found that 60% of companies report fraud losses that are “somewhat or significantly higher” than in previous years, with a majority of respondents citing AI-generated phishing attacks as their top AI-related fraud concern.
