Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In the early hours following reports of a U.S. military operation involving Venezuela, social media feeds were flooded with dramatic images and videos that appeared to show the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Within minutes, AI-generated photos of Maduro being escorted by U.S. law enforcement, scenes of missiles striking Caracas, and crowds celebrating in the streets racked up millions of views across various social media channels. The problem?

Researchers at Push Security have observed a new variant of the ClickFix attack that combines “OAuth consent phishing with a ClickFix-style user prompt that leads to account compromise.” The technique, which the researchers call “ConsentFix,” tricks victims into copying and pasting a localhost URL containing an authorization token, then pasting it into a phishing page.

Over 90% of parked domains now direct users to malicious content, compared to less than 5% a decade ago, according to researchers at Infoblox. “Parking threats are fueled by lookalike domains,” Infoblox explained. “No domain is immune. When one of our researchers tried to report a crime to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), they accidentally visited ic3gov. Their phone was quickly redirected to a false “Drive Subscription Expired” page.

Zscaler has published a report on a new phishing kit dubbed “BlackForce” that uses Man-in-the-Browser (MitB) attacks to steal credentials and bypass multi-factor authentication. Notably, the kit “features a vetting system to qualify targets, after which a live operator takes over to orchestrate a guided compromise.” Additionally, the phishing kit uses mostly legitimate code in order to avoid detection by security scanners.

Eighty-one percent of small businesses suffered a security or data breach over the past year, and 38% of these businesses were forced to raise their prices as a result, a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) has found. The report notes that external hackers have overtaken malicious insiders as the most common root cause of these incidents. This trend is partially driven by AI-assisted social engineering attacks, which were cited as a root cause by more than 41% of victims.

“Super-app” WeChat offers a wealth of functionality—from instant messaging, text and voice messaging, and video calls to mobile payments, ride booking, ordering food deliveries, paying bills and even accessing government services. Provided by Chinese technology conglomerate Tencent, WeChat has become deeply integrated into daily life in China and usage has been spreading globally. The app now boasts over 1.4 billion active users (24.8% of total internet users).