Researchers at Cisco Talos are tracking a significant increase in phishing campaigns that abuse legitimate platforms. Attackers abused more than 25 legitimate services over the past year, including “collaboration, productivity, file-sharing, survey, payment and AI-related platforms.”

In two campaigns, attackers used order notifications from Staples and Dell to distribute phishing messages. The organizations themselves were not compromised, but the threat actors inserted phishing content into the fields that were supposed to contain shipping information.

Researchers at Malwarebytes warn that a phishing campaign is using spoofed Calendly pages to trick users into handing over their Facebook and Google account credentials. The phishing sites pose as Calendly booking pages for job interviews at Meta, asking users to enter their information to sign up for a phone call with a recruiter.

A phishing campaign is targeting YouTubers with phony sponsorship offers, according to researchers at ESET. The emails are personalized to each target, making specific references to their channels, and are designed to trick users into granting access to their Google accounts.

A phishing campaign is using AI-themed lures to target employees who operate advertising accounts, according to a new report from Island. The campaign is launched from a phishing platform that poses as a portfolio of AI advertising tools, using branding from Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Muse. The platform’s operator added a fake Muse Ads lure eight days after Meta launched its Muse AI agent.

Microsoft is tracking phishing campaigns that use various lures to deliver MSP360, a legitimate RMM tool that attackers are abusing to gain a foothold on compromised systems.

A phishing campaign is targeting Google accounts with lures that promise free subscriptions to Anthropic’s Claude Max AI model, Malwarebytes warns.

Researchers at Netskope are tracking a phishing kit that hijacks users’ browser windows to display fake security alerts. The malicious websites are distributed via Google Ads, and pose as normal online stores. Once a user clicks a link on the page, however, the site will present them with an urgent-looking security warning.

Lead Analysts: Lucy Gee and Emily Hanlon

As millions of shoppers prepare their wishlists and await discounts for Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days starting October 6, cybercriminals are gearing up for their own payday.

Lead Analysts: Prabhakaran Ravichandhiran, Jeewan Singh Jalal

By Shikhar Dalela and Jeewan Singh Jalal

The operators named the kit themselves.

Buried inside compromised legitimate websites, the hidden staging directory is sometimes literally called “/.bulletproof”, and the PHP session cookie the kit sets on every visitor is named “bp_redir_sess.” The “bp” stands for bulletproof, which is an unusual degree of candor from a threat actor whose entire design philosophy is concealment.

Apple is warning users to be wary of unsolicited FaceTime calls amidst a wave of scams impersonating Apple Support, Malwarebytes reports. The scammers inform the user that there’s been fraudulent activity or a technical problem associated with their account, and trick the victim into handing over payment card details, banking credentials or Apple ID logins.

Lead Analysts: Prabhakaran Ravichandhiran and Jeewan Singh Jalal

Most phishing attacks pick a target and commit to a tactic. This one picks the tactic based on the target, which happens dynamically, per device, in milliseconds, without the victim ever knowing a decision was made.

Fifty-three percent of organizations have had an executive or employee impersonated in targeted social engineering attacks over the past year, according to a new report from Outtake. Just over half of this impersonation activity took place on social media platforms using fake profiles, followed by video platforms.

Threat actors are using a new technique called “phantom squatting” to trick AI tools into directing users to phishing sites, according to researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42.

Since AI models frequently hallucinate phony information, they sometimes point users to websites that don’t exist. Threat actors are now registering these AI-hallucinated domains and using them to host phishing sites.