Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Social engineering remained the top initial access vector for cyberattacks in 2025, with increasing assistance from AI tools, according to a report from ThreatDown. The researchers warn that AI will likely become a core component of social engineering attacks throughout 2026. “Deepfake voice, image, and video impersonation now requires minimal expertise and only a handful of reference images or seconds of audio,” the researchers write.

AI-driven fraud attacks spiked by more than 1200% in December 2025, according to a new report by Pindrop Security. Threat actors are using AI to assist in every stage of the attack, from deploying bots to conduct reconnaissance to using deepfakes to trick humans. “According to Pindrop internal data, AI fraud (or non-live fraud) surged 1210% by December 2025,” the researchers write.

There's a moment in every security professional's career when they realise the game has fundamentally changed. Mine came last Tuesday at 3:47 PM, watching my colleague Erich argue with an AI agent about expense policy while simultaneously being phished by what I'm 87% certain was another AI agent pretending to be from IT. We’ve spent decades building security models around a simple premise: humans work here, threats exist out there, and our job is to build bigger walls between the two.

Cybercriminals are abusing legitimate invoices and dispute notifications from popular services to send scam emails that bypass security filters, according to researchers at Kaseya’s INKY. The attackers have used this technique to impersonate PayPal, Apple, DocuSign, HelloSign, and others. “These platforms often allow users to enter a ‘seller name’ or add a custom note when creating an invoice or notification,” the researchers write.

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Lead Analysts: Jeewan Singh Jalal, Prabhakaran Ravichandhiran and Anand Bodke KnowBe4 Threat Labs has detected a sophisticated phishing campaign targeting North American businesses and professionals. This attack compromises Microsoft 365 accounts (Outlook, Teams, OneDrive) by abusing the OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant flow, bypassing strong passwords and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).

Researchers at Okta warn that a series of phishing kits have emerged that are designed to help threat actors launch sophisticated voice phishing (vishing) attacks that can bypass multifactor authentication. “The most critical of these features are client-side scripts that allow threat actors to control the authentication flow in the browser of a targeted user in real-time while they deliver verbal instructions or respond to verbal feedback from the targeted user,” Okta says.

A new malware-as-a-service (MaaS) kit called “Stanley” is offering users guaranteed publication in the Chrome Web Store, bypassing Google’s security verification process, according to researchers at Varonis. “For $2,000 to $6,000, Stanley provides a turnkey website-spoofing operation disguised as a Chrome extension, with its premium tier promising guaranteed publication on the Chrome Web Store,” Varonis says.

Researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 warn of a proof-of-concept (PoC) attack technique in which threat actors could use AI tools to generate malicious JavaScript in real time on seemingly innocuous webpages. “Once loaded in the victim's browser, the initial webpage makes requests for client-side JavaScript to popular and trusted LLM clients (e.g., DeepSeek and Google Gemini, though the PoC could be effective across a number of models),” the researchers write.

Commodity phishing platforms are now a central component of the cybercriminal economy, according to researchers at Flare. These platforms allow threat actors of all skill levels to carry out advanced attacks at scale.