Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Researchers at Microsoft are tracking an AI-assisted phishing campaign that sent over a million emails attempting to conduct payment diversion scams.

A massive phishing campaign is using invisible Unicode tag characters to evade security filters, according to researchers at Microsoft. This technique, known as “ASCII smuggling,” has grown popular over the past year for launching AI prompt injection attacks, but the same tactic can hide suspicious text in emails.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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. The threat actors first impersonated a real Gen executive based in Dublin, who introduced a second impersonated person who claimed to work at PwC.

Researchers at INKY observed a major phishing campaign that used SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) image files to deliver malicious JavaScript. While abuse of SVG files isn’t new, INKY says their use in phishing campaigns has exploded over the past year.

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. “Businesses identify AI-generated phishing as the most common AI-enabled fraud risk at 53%,” the report says.