Cybercriminals have found a new way of leveraging legitimate web services for malicious purposes, this time with the benefit of added automation of campaign actions. Security researchers at CheckPoint have discovered a new phishing campaign that uses Google App Scripts – a scripting platform developed by Google that lets you integrate with and automate tasks across Google products – as the destination in malicious links.

For phishing scammers, the holidays are the most wonderful time of the year – or so holiday phishing trends would suggest. Cyberint research shows that phishing alerts surged by 46 percent last December compared to the monthly average observed throughout the year. Similarly, an Akamai study found a 150 percent increase in phishing victims between mid-October and late November 2021.

A free phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform named Sniper Dz has assisted in the creation of more than 140,000 phishing sites over the past year, according to researchers at Palo Alto Networks. The service allows unskilled criminals to spin up sophisticated phishing sites that steal credentials or deliver malware.

The recent cyber attack on Dick's Sporting Goods makes it clear that email played a critical role and emphasizes the need for better security controls. Dick’s Sporting Goods is a $12 billion company with more than 800 stores across the United States. That measure of success made the retailer the target of a recent cyber attack. A filing with the U.S.

In social engineering attacks like smishing and phishing, the mind is the real target. How often do we quickly glance at a text or email and click without a second thought about its origins? Scammers know this, so they prey on the urgency conveyed in the convincing messages sent to your valued customers and unprepared coworkers. Opportunistic scammers send 3.4 billion spam emails daily.

Read also: Two crypto thieves arrested in the US, the creator of the Skynet Dark Web market sentenced, and more.

Phishing campaign leverages HTTP headers for credential theft, Scattered Spider targets cloud accounts, and UNC2970 exploits victims looking for jobs.

HTML smuggling techniques have been around for quite some time. A previous Trustwave SpiderLabs’ blog discussed its use in distributing malware by storing binaries in immutable blob data within JavaScript code that gets decoded on the client-side browser, eventually delivering the payload.

A phishing campaign is targeting GitHub users with phony CAPTCHA pages, according to researchers at McAfee. The phishing emails ask users to address a security vulnerability in a GitHub repository that they recently contributed to, and contain a link to find more information about the alleged vulnerability. This link leads to a fake CAPTCHA page that attempts to trick them into installing malware.