Security News

An advanced persistent threat group, with ties to Iran, is believed behind a phishing campaign targeting high-profile government and military Israeli personnel, according to a report by Check Point Software. Targets of the campaign included a senior leadership in the Israeli defense industry, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and the former Deputy Prime Minister of Israel.

There's no such thing as free beer for Father's Day - at least not from Heineken. "This is a scam and is not sanctioned by Heineken," the beermaker said in a tweet, adding it has alerted the UK's national fraud and cybercrime reporting agency.

The APWG's Phishing Activity Trends Report reveals that in the first quarter of 2022 there were 1,025,968 total phishing attacks-the worst quarter for phishing observed to date. In the first quarter of 2022, OpSec Security reported that phishing attacks against the financial sector, which includes banks, remained the largest set of attacks, accounting for 23.6 percent of all phishing.

An ongoing phishing campaign targeting Facebook users may have already netted hundreds of millions of credentials and a claimed $59 million, and it's only getting bigger. Identified by security researchers at phishing prevention company Pixm in late 2021, the campaign has only been running since the final quarter of last year, but has already proven incredibly successful.

Researchers have uncovered a large-scale phishing operation that abused Facebook and Messenger to lure millions of users to phishing pages, tricking them into entering their account credentials and seeing advertisements. While it is unknown how the campaign initially started, PIXM states victims arrived at phishing landing pages from a series of redirects originating from Facebook Messenger.

Other state-backed threat actors have started exploiting it, but now one of the most active Qbot malware affiliates has also been spotted leveraging Follina. Archive contains an IMG with a Word doc, shortcut file, and DLL. The LNK will execute the DLL to start Qbot.

A critical Windows zero-day vulnerability, known as Follina and still waiting for an official fix from Microsoft, is now being actively exploited in ongoing phishing attacks to infect recipients with Qbot malware. As Proofpoint security researchers shared today, the TA570 Qbot affiliate has now begun using malicious Microsoft Office.

Microsoft has obtained a court order to seize 41 domains used by what the Windows giant said was an Iranian cybercrime group that ran a spear-phishing operation targeting organizations in the US, Middle East, and India. The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit said the gang, dubbed Bohrium, took a particular interest in those working in technology, transportation, government, and education sectors: its members would pretend to be job recruiters to lure marks into running malware on their PCs. "Bohrium actors create fake social media profiles, often posing as recruiters," said Amy Hogan-Burney, GM of Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit.

European governments and US local governments were the targets of a phishing campaign using malicious Rich Text Format documents designed to exploit a critical Windows zero-day vulnerability known as Follina. BleepingComputer is aware of local governments in at least two US states that were targeted by this phishing campaign.

Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit last week disclosed that it had taken legal proceedings against an Iranian threat actor dubbed Bohrium in connection with a spear-phishing operation. "Bohrium actors create fake social media profiles, often posing as recruiters," Amy Hogan-Burney of the DCU said in a tweet.