The dismantling of USAID by Elon Musk's DOGE and a State Department funding freeze have severely disrupted efforts to help people escape forced labor camps run by criminal scammers.

As Elon Musk’s DOGE team continues to rampage through United States federal agencies, Trump administration efforts to eliminate the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) seem to be furthest along. The impacts of the agency’s dismantling on humanitarian relief, public health, and human rights work, combined with the wider 90-day State Department pause on foreign aid payments, are already far-reaching and severe around the world. Sources tell WIRED that the situation is also impacting anti-human-trafficking work targeted at addressing forced labor compounds that fuel digital fraud like investment scams.

The funding cuts and pauses have immediately made it harder for people to safely escape scam compounds, according to half a dozen sources working to combat scams and trafficking. The cuts have also shrunk services that house and care for human trafficking victims and are limiting investigatory work into criminal groups. After just days of funding disruptions, sources say that the cuts have caused “chaos” for staff working to help survivors on a daily basis. Some organizations have already gone dark, and relief workers add that the withdrawal of services could embolden the criminal groups behind the fraud.

“It is a really, really bad situation,” says one person working in the anti-scam sector in Southeast Asia. The individual, as with several sources in this story, requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the work and ongoing changing situation. They say small grassroots organizations, which may have only a handful of staff each but help identify and work with trafficking victims, have been widely affected. “This pause will mean that organizations that essentially shifted their work from different forms of trafficking to looking at scamming compounds will cease to exist,” they say.

USAID and the US State Department did not immediately respond to questions from WIRED about the situation.

**Got a tip?**

_Are you a current or former USAID or State Department employee or a worker familiar with anti-human-trafficking efforts? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact Matt Burgess securely on Signal at mattburgess.20 and Lily Hay Newman at +1 (347) 722-1347._

Over the past five years, dozens of “scam compounds” have been constructed in Southeast Asia, particularly within Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. Run by organized crime groups, which often have links to Chinese nationals, more than 200,000 people from 100-plus countries have been trafficked into the compounds—often under the pretense of getting a legitimate job. These people are often held captive, beaten and tortured, and forced to work long shifts running online scams targeting people around the world, including in the United States. While the compounds engage in a range of fraudulent activity, so-called pig butchering scams have been the predominant focus, with global losses estimated at $75 billion or more.

Law enforcement efforts in Southeast Asia to tackle scam compounds and the criminal organizations heavily profiting from them have sometimes made progress, but have also been widely criticized for corruption and failing to comprehensively deal with the problem. However, a patchwork of NGOs, charities, and anti-trafficking organizations have been attempting to fill the gaps, helping victims escape and get access to legal advice, health care, and other resources. A US State Department webpage details more than $272 million in funding provided to fight human trafficking around the world, with Southeast Asia programs that include investigative efforts, survivor protection, and more. And USAID directly funds humanitarian groups in the region.

Julia Macher, the CEO of Freedom Collaborative, a network that has been impacted by the freezes and works with grassroots groups fighting scam compounds, says the repercussions of the drastic changes at USAID have been “instantaneous.”

“Our partners say that for some survivors they are in touch with inside the scam centers, even if they can somehow manage to get out, they then have no place to put them. Then, the survivors have no money for a flight home and no place to go, so they get re-recruited into the centers, as they do not have any real alternative options,” Macher says. “Some survivors have injuries like broken bones from jumping out the window to escape, and now the organizations have no money to put them into the hospitals, and without medical care, the survivors could become paralyzed.”

Multiple sources tell WIRED that organizations that have relied on funding have had to stop or reduce work and lay off staffers. Macher, who has been running working groups with members of her network over the last week, says some survivors of scam compounds are being given assistance to return home; however, shelters that temporarily house them and provide care have been impacted. “Without a safe and dependable shelter to house them after their escape, some survivors opt to return to their exploitative work inside the scam centers despite knowing the risks,” Macher says.

“There are shelters in neighboring countries like Cambodia and Myanmar for people who’ve just been rescued, and there are helplines and so on that have now lost all of their funding overnight,” says Michael Brosowski, the founder of Blue Dragon, an impacted charity that has rescued more than 1,700 trafficking victims, including keeping people from being trafficked into brothels connected to online scamming.

Brosowski says Blue Dragon has been working to reduce the worst of the harm caused by the funding freezes. “We’ve been scrambling to work out what we can cut, how can we scale back, without losing the most direct work,” Brosowski says. For example, training programs for social workers who aid survivors of trafficking may have to be cut, Brosowski says.

Even if some funding does return—the State Department’s freeze is set to be in place for 90 days—organizations supporting victims may never be the same as staffers are forced to get other jobs or move away from the areas where they have been working locally with survivors. This loss of expertise will be extremely detrimental to the relief efforts, sources say.

“They’ve damaged relationships with local partners or authorities with whom they used to be working regularly to address these issues,” say two researchers at a global think tank who have had their work on policy recommendations on tackling scam compounds to the US government disrupted.

Aside from humanitarian efforts, the funding pauses are likely to allow, even temporarily, criminal organizations to further flourish. Some of the funding cuts impact programs designed to help identify potential criminals and assist local law enforcement efforts, according to one government affairs official at an international NGO with multiple US grants.

“Identifying criminal networks, identifying the bad actors, sending the information to the National Security Council. Everything that should be going on is stopped,” add the two global think tank researchers.

Ultimately, all of this means that trafficking victims will be trapped working in unimaginable conditions while more people in the US and around the world will be at risk of becoming victims in the ongoing fraud run from the compounds.

“These scam compounds, they scam people who are in the USA,” Brosowski, of Blue Dragon, says. “The US government might save hundreds of millions of dollars from cutting these sorts of programs, but the scammers are going to take billions.”

The Collapse of USAID Is Already Fueling Human Trafficking and Slavery at Scammer Compounds

New research highlights how bad actors could abuse deleted AWS S3 buckets to create all sorts of mayhem, including a SolarWinds-style supply chain attack.

Source: kovop via Shutterstock

Abandoned cloud storage buckets present a major, but largely overlooked, threat to Internet security, new research has shown.

The risks arise when bad actors discover and re-register these neglected digital repositories under their original name, and then use them to deliver malware or carry out other malicious actions against anyone still requesting files from them.

**A Far From Theoretical Threat**

The threat is far from theoretical, and the weakness is, in fact, incredibly easy to exploit, researchers from watchTowr discovered recently. The findings came as a follow-up to previous research they conducted last year on risks tied to expired and abandoned Internet domain names.

For the latest study, the researchers first searched the Internet for Amazon AWS S3 buckets referenced in deployment code or a software update mechanism. They then checked to see if those mechanisms were pulling down unsigned or unverified executables or code from the S3 buckets. The researchers discovered some 150 S3 buckets that at some time a government organization, Fortune 500 company, technology company, cybersecurity vendor or major open source project had used for software deployment, updates, configurations and similar purposes, and then abandoned.

To check what would happen, watchTowr registered the unused buckets using their original names for a total of around $400, and enabled logging on them to see who might request files from each S3 bucket. The company also wanted to find out what these users would request from the storage resources. To their surprise, in a two-month period, the S3 buckets received a staggering 8 million file requests, many of which the researchers could have very easily responded to with malware or some other malicious action.

Related:Name That Toon: Incentives

Among those requesting files from the abandoned S3 buckets were government agencies in the US, the UK, Australia, and other countries, Fortune 100 companies, a major payment card network, an industrial product company, global and regional banks, and cybersecurity companies.  

"We were not 'sniping' S3 buckets as they were deleted, nor employing any 'advanced' technique to register these S3 buckets," watchTowr researchers said in their report. "We just ... typed the name into the input box, and used the power of one finger to click register."

WatchTowr's analysis showed the S3 buckets receiving requests for a wide range of files, including software updates; unsigned Windows, Linux ad macOS binaries; virtual machine images; JavaScript files; SSL VPN configurations; and CloudFormation templates for defining and provisioning AWS cloud infrastructure services as code.

Related:Name That Toon: Meeting of Minds

Had the researchers wanted to, they could have trivially responded to any of these requests with things like a malicious software update, or a template that would have allowed them access to the requesting organization's AWS environment, or a backdoored virtual machine.

**A 'Terrifyingly Simple' Cloud Cyberattack Vector?**

"The main takeaway," says Benjamin Harris, CEO of watchTowr, "is the terrifyingly simple way by which hackers can create a major, SolarWinds-scale supply chain attack by abusing the relatively unknown vulnerability class of abandoned infrastructure."

While the study focused on AWS buckets, the same risks exist with any abandoned cloud storage resource that someone is able to find and re-register using the original name, according to watchTowr.   

"This is certainly not an AWS issue," Harris tells Dark Reading. "However, what is vital is that AWS customers understand that once a cloud resource is created, leveraged, and referenced in code — for example, in a software update process, or in a deployment manual or otherwise — that reference will exist forever," he says. The implications of that reference will survive in perpetuity as the watchTowr study showed, he cautions.

Related:New Essay Competition Explores AI's Role in Cybersecurity

According to Harris, watchTowr has tried to get AWS to stop allowing registration of S3 buckets under previously used names.

"We have repeatedly, like a broken record, shared our belief with the AWS teams that engaged with us that the most logical solution to the challenge here is to prevent the registration of S3 buckets using names that had been used previously," he says. This approach would entirely kill this vulnerability class — abandoned infrastructure — in the context of AWS S3 buckets.

"As always, there is likely an argument about the usability tradeoff, the ability to transfer S3 buckets between accounts, etc.," he adds. "But we do wonder if these requirements outweigh the impact we have demonstrated through our research."

**AWS Responds to Abandoned S3 Bucket Threat**

AWS itself quickly sinkholed the S3 buckets that watchTowr identified, so the attack scenarios the security vendor highlighted in its report won't work against the same resources, though the broader issue remains.

"The issues described in this blog occurred when customers deleted S3 buckets that were still being referenced by third-party applications," an AWS spokesperson tells Dark Reading. "After conducting their research without notifying AWS, watchTowr provided the bucket names to AWS, and to protect our customers, we blocked these specific buckets from being re-created."

A statement the person provided mentioned guidance that AWS has provided customers on best cloud bucket practices, and on using unique identifiers when creating bucket names to prevent unintended reuse. The company has also provided guidance on ensuring applications are properly configured to reference only customer-owned buckets, the statement said: "In 2020 we launched the bucket ownership condition feature and encouraged customers to use this mechanism, specifically designed to prevent unintended reuse of bucket names."

The statement went on to request that researchers engage with the company's security team before conducting research involving the company's services.

**About the Author**

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

Abandoned AWS Cloud Storage: A Major Cyberattack Vector

Web shops are an attractive target. How can SMBs keep theirs safe?

An online shop is more than just another way to sell your products. It comes with a responsibility to keep the web shop secure.

Cybercriminals are looking to steal your customers’ credit card details, their personal data, and even your revenue.

And it’s not as if using a platform that is used by major retailers makes it safe. Platforms like Shopify, Wix, and Magento are always under scrutiny of cybercriminals that are looking for a vulnerability that allows them to insert skimmers or get access to your database.

Let’s look at some examples to demonstrate my point.

A cybercriminal specializing in breaching Shopify stores is posting huge data sets as free downloads. Using the monicker ShopifyGUY, which implies they specialize in Shopify sites, the cybercriminal posted a few datasets containing millions of customer records.

boAt Lifestyle data free download

For example, boAt is reportedly Indian’s most active company that markets audio-focused electronic gadgets. ShopifyGUY dumped files of a data breach with access to PII information of boAt customers, which has 7,550,000 entries.

Piping Rock data for download

ShopifyGUY also uploaded the Piping Rock database containing 2.1million email addresses from the online health products store Piping Rock.

We found several Magento-based web shops that had skimmers injected into their code busy stealing credit card information. One of them even infected visitors with the SocGolish malware, a sophisticated JavaScript malware framework that has been actively used by cybercriminals since at least 2017. It tricks users into running a script supposedly meant to update their browser. What it actually does is infect the machine and send the details back to a human operator, who can decide how best to monetize it. Lately, SocGholish has been found to install information stealers on both Windows and Mac machines.

The most common attacks web shop owners need to worry about are:

*   Credential phishing where the criminals try to steal your login credentials.
*   Malware injection where the criminals inject malicious code into your web shop by abusing a vulnerability in the platform itself or a plug-in.
*   Brute force attacks, where the criminals try a whole bunch of passwords they obtained from other breaches.

So, to keep your web shop safe you should:

*   Be extra vigilant when it comes to phishing attempts.
*   Keep your software up to date.
*   Protect the device(s) you use to login with an active anti-malware solution.
*   Make it harder to log in by using multi-factor authentication (MFA) and by not re-using passwords.
*   Regularly check your web site for additional code, especially the payment section.
*   If you run the web shop on your own server, use web application firewalls (WAF) to detect and block malicious traffic.
*   Do not store customer details that you no longer need.

Your customers will probably not thank you for your efforts, but they will come complaining if you spill their data.

For readers that would like to check whether their credentials are included in one of the data breaches, Malwarebytes has a free tool for you to check how much of your personal data has been exposed online. Submit your email address (it’s best to give the one you most frequently use) to our free Digital Footprint scan and we’ll give you a report and recommendations.

 Small business owners, secure your web shop 

The North Korea-linked Lazarus Group has been linked to an active campaign that leverages fake LinkedIn job offers in the cryptocurrency and travel sectors to deliver malware capable of infecting Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.
According to cybersecurity company Bitdefender, the scam begins with a message sent on a professional social media network, enticing them with the promise of

Cross-Platform JavaScript Stealer Targets Crypto Wallets in New Lazarus Group Campaign

Ransomware gangs continued to wreak havoc in 2024, but new research shows that the amounts victims paid these cybercriminals fell by hundreds of millions of dollars.

For much of the past year, the trail of destruction and mayhem left behind by ransomware hackers was on full display. Digital extortion gangs paralyzed hundreds of US pharmacies and clinics through their attack on Change Healthcare, exploited security vulnerabilities in the customer accounts of cloud provider Snowflake to breach a string of high-profile targets, and extracted a record $75 million from a single victim.

Yet beneath those headlines, the numbers tell a surprising story: Ransomware payments actually fell overall in 2024—and in the second half of the year dropped more precipitously than in any six-month period on record.

Cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis today released a portion of its annual crime report focused on tracking the ransomware industry, which found that ransomware victims’ extortion payments totaled $814 million in 2024, a drop of 35 percent compared to the record $1.25 billion that hackers extracted from ransomware victims the previous year. Breaking down the payments over the course of 2024 shows an even more positive trend: Hackers collected just $321 million from July through December compared to $492 million the previous half year, the biggest falloff in payments between two six-month periods that Chainalysis has ever seen.

“The drastic reversal of the trends we were seeing in the first half of the year to the second was quite surprising,” says Jackie Burns Koven, who leads cyber threat intelligence at Chainalysis. She suggests that dropoff is likely due to law enforcement takedowns and disruptions, some of which had delayed effects that weren't immediately apparent in the first half of the year as ransomware victims and the cybersecurity industry grappled with catastrophic attacks.

“Don't get me wrong: For everyone who's a defender or an incident responder, it's been _a year,_" Burns Koven says. “But it is noteworthy that for the major attacks that occurred last year, those groups don't exist anymore or have been laying low. There's been a strong signal from law enforcement that if you cross the line, there's going to be consequences.”

US and UK law enforcement scored two significant disruptions of major ransomware groups around the beginning of 2024: Six days before Christmas of 2023, the FBI announced that it had found vulnerabilities in the encryption software used by the group known as BlackCat or AlphV, distributed decryption keys to victims to foil the group’s extortion tactics, and taken down the dark-web sites the group had used to issue its threats. Two months later, in February of 2024, the UK’s National Crime Agency carried out an operation against the notorious ransomware group Lockbit, hijacking its infrastructure, seizing its cryptocurrency wallets, taking down its dark-web sites, and even obtaining information about its members and cybercriminal partners.

Initially, however, both groups seemed to bounce back from those busts. AlphV in February announced that it had hacked Change Healthcare, disabling payments at hundreds of US clinics and pharmacies and extracting $22 million from the United Healthcare–owned company in one of the worst health-care-related ransomware incidents in history. Lockbit, too, seemed to shake off the NCA’s blows, immediately launching a new dark-web site where it continued to extort victims old and new.

But in fact, both law enforcement operations may have been more successful than they appeared. AlphV, after receiving its $22 million ransom from Change Healthcare, pulled a so-called “exit scam,” taking the money and disappearing rather than sharing it with the hacker partners who had carried out the Change breach. Lockbit, too, largely fell off the map in the months that followed the NCA’s takedown, due perhaps to the cybercriminal underground’s distrust of the group and its alleged leader, Dmitry Khoroshev, when it became clear the NCA had identified him. In May of 2024, Khoroshev was also sanctioned by the US Treasury, making it far more legally complicated for Lockbit victims to pay a ransom to the group.

While the vacuum left behind by those major players in the ransomware ecosystem was filled by newer groups during the second half of 2024, many of them didn’t have the skills or experience to go after targets as big and as well defended as Lockbit and AlphV had, says Burns Koven. The result, she says, was far smaller ransom payments, often in the tens of thousands of dollars rather than the millions or tens of millions.

“Their talent is not quite as robust as their predecessors,“ Burns Koven says of the newer generation of ransomware gangs. “We're seeing the hangover of these law enforcement takedowns, not just directly targeting individuals and strains of malware but also the infrastructure and tools and services that had been used to help perpetuate these attacks.”

Last year actually saw more ransomware incidents than the previous year, says Allan Liska, a threat intelligence analyst focused on ransomware at the security firm Recorded Future. The firm counted 4,634 attacks in 2024 versus 4,400 in 2023. But the lower ransom amounts received by those newer ransomware groups suggests they may have been favoring quantity over quality, he says. “What we're seeing in terms of payments is a reflection of newer threat actors being attracted by the amount of money that they see you can make in ransomware, trying to get into the game and not being very good at it,” Liska says.

In addition to major law enforcement actions at the beginning of 2024, Chainalysis attributes the decline in payments during the second half of the year to heightened global awareness about the threat of ransomware, leading to more mature defenses and response plans within governments and other institutions. And Burns Koven adds that cryptocurrency regulation and law enforcement crackdowns on money laundering infrastructure, including mixers that help criminals anonymize and obfuscate the source of their ill-gotten cryptocurrencies, have also eroded ransomware actors’ abilities to handle payments without specialized knowledge.

While the decline in payments during the second half of 2024 is significant for being the largest ever in Chainalysis’s data, the number of ransomware attacks and volume of payments has fluctuated and declined before. Notably, researchers saw a marked decrease in activity in 2022, a year in which Chainalysis placed total ransomware payments at $655 million compared to $1.07 billion in 2021 and nearly $1 billion in 2020. But while governments and defenders were initially heartened that their deterrence efforts were working, ransomware surged back as an even more dire threat in 2023, totaling, by Chainalysis’s count, $1.25 billion in payments that year.

"I think ebbs and flows are inevitable," says Brett Callow, a managing director at FTI Consulting and longtime ransomware researcher. "If the baddies had a couple of brilliant quarters, a dip will follow, same as if the goodies had some good quarters. That's why we really need to analyze trends over a longer period, because increases and decreases over shorter periods don't really tell us much.”

Additionally, researchers have long warned that it is difficult to get truly reliable numbers about the volume of ransomware attacks and an accurate total of payments each year. This is partly the result of attackers attempting to inflate their records and make themselves seem more effective and menacing by claiming old data breaches as new attacks or simply making up attacks that they haven’t actually carried out. And it is always difficult to get accurate numbers about ransomware (not to mention digital scams more broadly), because stigma and regulatory requirements often keep victims from coming forward. This makes ransomware forecasting more of an art than a science.

"My vibe from the second half of 2024 is that if there was a decrease, there will also be a rebound," Callow says.

Chainalysis researchers are clear that the 2024 payment decline is not a guarantee of future reductions in ransomware attacks. But Burns Coven emphasizes that for defenders who are in the trenches on incident response, the data point is useful for making the case that sustained investment in ransomware defense is worthwhile.

“We're still standing in the rubble, right? We can't go tell everyone, everything's great, we solved ransomware—they’re continuing to go after schools, after hospitals and critical infrastructure," says Burns Koven. But, she adds, “I don't think anybody's necessarily celebrating. I think it's a signal of what work needs to be continued.”

Despite Catastrophic Hacks, Ransomware Payments Dropped Dramatically Last Year

A global phishing campaign is actively exploiting a legacy Microsoft authentication system to steal user credentials and bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), targeting over 150 organizations.

A global phishing campaign is underway, exploiting a legacy Microsoft authentication system to steal user credentials and bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), targeting over 150 organizations.

A sophisticated phishing campaign is exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to compromise user accounts and bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), as revealed in research by Abnormal Security.

The attackers employ a combination of social engineering and technical manipulation. Phishing emails, mimicking legitimate notifications, lure victims to spoofed ADFS login pages. These emails often use urgent tones, warn of supposed updates or policy changes, and incorporate legitimate branding, logos, and even contact information to appear genuine. 

One of the phishing pages was sent to a targeted company (Via Abnormal Security)

URL obfuscation and shortened links further conceal the malicious destination.  It is worth noting that the attackers personalize the phishing pages to match the target organization’s specific MFA setup, such as tailoring prompts for push notifications, and mechanisms like Microsoft Authenticator, Duo Security, and SMS verification. 

The phishing landing page replicates the organization’s ADFS portal, dynamically pulling logos and design elements, creating a convincing counterfeit. While some client-side validation might exist, the page does not verify credentials against the organization’s systems since any username and password combination is accepted.  

The next step involves capturing the user’s second-factor authentication. Phishing templates are designed to collect various MFA factors, including codes from authenticator apps, SMS messages, or even push notifications. This information, coupled with the stolen credentials, is relayed to the attackers.

To complete the deception, the victim is redirected to the genuine ADFS login page after submitting their information, reinforcing the illusion of a successful login. With the stolen credentials and MFA details, the attackers proceed with account takeover (ATO), often using VPNs to mask their location.  Post-compromise activity typically includes internal reconnaissance, setting up mail filter rules to conceal their presence, and launching lateral phishing attacks.

Lateral phishing, sent from the compromised account, leverages established trust relationships within the organization. These emails often mimic legitimate communication patterns, targeting colleagues and associates. The mail filter rules, often with deceptive names and obfuscated keywords (e.g., “Hish” for “Phish”), help the attackers remain undetected.

“This approach leverages nuanced psychological tactics to exploit human vulnerabilities and reinforce a false sense of legitimacy,” Abnormal Security’s report read.

A fake Microsoft ADFS used in the campaign (Via Abnormal Security)

Research reveals that this campaign has targeted over 150 organizations in various sectors. The education sector is most impacted with 50% of attacks followed by healthcare (14.8%), government (12.5%), technology (6.3%), and transportation (3.4%).  Geographically, the attacks are largely focused on the United States, but incidents have also been reported in Canada, Australia, and Europe.

The report suggests that attackers are exploiting the fact that many organizations have not switched to Microsoft’s modern identity platform, Entra. ADF reliance is particularly prevalent in sectors with slower technology adoption, emphasizing the need for prioritizing migration to modern solutions and employing a multi-layered security approach.

Roger Grimes, a data-driven defence evangelist at KnowBe4, commented on the issue, telling Hackread.com that this is the first time they have heard about fake ADFS login pages hinting at the sophistication of this campaign.

_“_I’m a 36-year cybersecurity expert and author of 15 books (one on hacking MFA and over 1,500 articles. This is the first time I’ve read about fake ADFS login pages, but ADFS has been involved in bypassing MFA authentication before, so it’s not completely new to use in the hacker scene._“_

_“_All users should use phishing-resistant MFA whenever they can,_“_ Roger warned. _“_Unfortunately, most of today’s most popular MFA solutions, including Microsoft Authenticator, Google Authenticator, Duo, push-based MFA, OTP, and SMS-based MFA are very phishable and subject to the exact type of attack reported here._“_

Hackers Using Fake Microsoft ADFS Login Pages to Steal Credentials

Fraud groups are using cutting-edge technology to scale their operations to create fake identities and execute fraud campaigns.

Source: Mike via Adobe Stock Photo

Question: How are modern fraud groups using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and deepfakes to steal millions of dollars?

Answer: If you imagine a fake identity document, what springs to mind? Is it a faded World War II-era identity card with a false name written in neat script next to a black and white photo? Is it a driver's license from a state you had never actually been to with your photo and a fake name, address, and birthday that you showed to the bars in your college town so you could drink when you were underage? Sometimes those documents worked. Sometimes they didn't.

The forgeries created by modern fraud groups use cutting-edge AI-driven deepfake technology to create fake identities, avatars, and documents that even a trained eye would have trouble spotting, says Ofer Freidman, chief business development officer of identity verification and ID management automation company AU10TIX. These groups are using GenAI to steal personal data, craft convincing fake identities, and execute fraud schemes.

Fraudsters acquire personal data from individuals through a combination of methods, including phishing, social engineering, and hacking corporate databases. They can also buy the information from cybercrime marketplaces. They can then use an AI system to randomize the information, such as names, addresses, and document numbers, to generate new fake identities. AI is better at avoiding repetitive patterns than humans, making it more likely that these fake identities will evade detection systems and monitors, Friedman says. 

Traditional forgeries could be identified by spotting inconsistencies, such as mismatched shadows or areas that were low resolution compared to the rest. While there are ways to identify deepfakes (such as counting the fingers on the person's hands), each model is getting better at producing uniform, high-quality content. 

For fraudsters, every payday doesn't need to be huge because they are operating in an "industrialized, systematic way," Friedman says. "You can go for $1 million or you can go 100 times for $10,000. It's the same effort because it's a machine doing it for you, unlike the good old days when you actually had to do it one by one."

**About the Author**

Contributing Writer

Jennifer Lawinski is a writer and editor with more than 20 years experience in media, covering a wide range of topics including business, news, culture, science, technology and cybersecurity. After earning a Master's degree in Journalism from Boston University, she started her career as a beat reporter for The Daily News of Newburyport. She has since written for a variety of publications including CNN, Fox News, Tech Target, CRN, CIO Insight, MSN News and Live Science. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and two cats.

How Are Modern Fraud Groups Using GenAI and Deepfakes?

Targets are lured into a fake interview process that convinces them to download malware needed for a virtual interview.

Source: imageBROKER.com GmbH & Co. KG via Alamy Stock Photo

NEWS BRIEF

In a new patch for its on-device malware tool, Apple is pushing signature updates to XProtect in order to block variants of a malware belonging to what is known as the macOS Ferret family.

This malware has been identified as part of "Contagious Interview," a North Korean campaign involving threat actors luring in targets and convincing them to install malware onto their devices through a fake job interview process. The other variants in the campaign include: FROSTYFERRET\_UI, FRIENDLYFERRET\_SECD, and MULTI\_FROSTYFERRET\_CMDCODES.

The DPRK malware family was first detailed by researchers in December 2024 and again in January where, as part of the campaign, targets are asked to communicate with an "interviewee" through a link that requests to install a piece of software required for virtual meetings.

Once installed, it runs a malicious shell script and installs a persistence agent, as well as an executable impersonating a Google Chrome update. 

The Contagious Interview attack chains are designed to drop JavaScript-based malware "BeaverTail," which delivers a Python backdoor known as InvisibleFerret, and harvests sensitive data from Web browsers and crypto wallets.

And now researchers at SentinelOne are highlighting samples they're calling "FlexibleFerret" that went undetected by XProtect as of Feb. 3, suggesting that the threat actors are honing their tactics to evade detection. This component dates as far back as November 2023.

"In an example in late December, one 'commenter' left instructions leading to the download of Ferret family droppers," stated the SentinelOne researchers. "This suggests that the threat actors are happy to expand the vectors by which they deliver the malware beyond the specific targeting of job seekers to developers more generally."

**About the Author**

Skilled writer and editor covering cybersecurity for Dark Reading.

Ferret Malware Added to 'Contagious Interview' Campaign

Morphisec uncovers a new ValleyRAT malware variant with advanced evasion tactics, multi-stage infection chains, and novel delivery methods…

Morphisec uncovers a new ValleyRAT malware variant with advanced evasion tactics, multi-stage infection chains, and novel delivery methods targeting systems.

Cybersecurity researchers at Morphisec Threat Lab have discovered a new version of the sophisticated ValleyRAT malware distributed through various channels including phishing emails, instant messaging platforms and compromised websites. ValleyRAT is a multi-stage malware, linked to the notorious **Silver Fox APT** group.

According to Morphisec’s investigation, shared with Hackread.com, the key targets of this campaign are high-value individuals within organizations, especially those in finance, accounting, and sales, and the objective is to steal sensitive data.

Infection Chain (Via Morphisec)

Earlier ValleyRAT versions utilized PowerShell scripts disguised as legitimate software installers, which often employed DLL hijacking to inject their payload into signed executables from programs like WPS Office and even Firefox. In August 2024, Hackread.com **reported** about a ValleyRAT version using shellcode to inject malware components directly into the memory. 

Conversely, the current version uses a fake Chinese telecom company “Karlos” website (karlostclub/) to distribute the malware, which downloads a series of files, including a .NET executable that checks for administrator privileges and downloads additional components, including a DLL file.

“Interestingly, the actor reused the same URL for both the older and newer versions of their attack,” researchers wrote in the **blog post**.

According to researchers, a fake Chrome browser download from anizomcom/ is the initial infection vector in the attack chain, tricking the victim into downloading and executing the malware. The sscronet.dll file, deliberately named with a legitimate-sounding identifier to avoid suspicion, injects code into the legitimate svchost.exe process, acting as a monitor, terminating any processes on a predefined exclusion list to prevent interference with the malware’s operation. 

Fake Chrome browser download (Via Morphisec)

Next, the malware utilizes a modified version of the Douyin (Chinese TikTok) executable for DLL side-loading and a legitimate Tier0.dll from Valve games (specifically Left 4 Dead 2 and Killing Floor 2) to execute code hidden within the nslookup.exe process. This process retrieves and decrypts the main ValleyRAT payload from mpclient.dat. 

The decrypted payload uses the **Donut shellcode** to execute the malware in memory, bypassing traditional disk-based detection methods. It also tries to disable security mechanisms like AMSI and ETW.

For your information, ValleyRAT is a C++-based remote access trojan with basic **RAT functionalities** such as accessing the WinSta0 window station for screen, keyboard, and mouse interaction and monitoring the victim’s screen. It incorporates extensive anti-VMware checks to evade detection in virtualized environments and connects with its C2 server using IP addresses and ports that are initialized within its code during installation.

“If the malware does not detect that it is running inside a virtual machine (VM), it attempts to establish a connection to baidu.com as part of its network communication check,” researchers noted.

The Silver Fox APT group’s changing tactics/evasion techniques show the growing sophistication of new attacks. Organizations should adopt a proper security strategy, including stricter endpoint protection, **employee training**, and continuous monitoring, to mitigate risks.

New ValleyRAT Malware Variant Spreading via Fake Chrome Downloads

"Agentic" AI could arrive in 2025, and it may allow hackers to send individual, AI-powered agents to do their dirty work.

A paradigm shift in technology is hurtling towards us, and it could change everything we know about cybersecurity.

Uhh, again, that is.

When ChatGPT was unveiled to the public in late 2022, security experts looked on with cautious optimism, excited about the new technology but concerned about its use in cyberattacks. But two years on, much of what ChatGPT and other generative AI chat tools offer attackers is a way to improve what already works, not new ways to deliver attacks themselves.

And yet, if artificial intelligence achieves what is called an “agentic” model in 2025, novel and boundless attacks could be within reach, as AI tools take on the roles of “agents” that independently discover vulnerabilities, steal logins, and pry into accounts.

These agents could even hold people for ransom by matching stolen data online with publicly known email addresses or social media accounts, composing messages and holding entire conversations with victims who believe a human hacker out there has access to their Social Security Number, physical address, credit card info, and more. And if the model works for individuals, there’s little reason it wouldn’t work for individual business owners.

This warning comes from our 2025 State of Malware report, which compiled a year’s worth of intelligence to identify the most pressing cyberattacks on the horizon. Though the report’s guidance serves IT teams, its threats will impact individuals and small businesses everywhere. Remember that just last year a widespread IT outage grounded flights globally, cementing the relationship between companies, cybersecurity, and everyday people.

In 2025, agentic AI may further reveal just how closely tied everyone is in the battle for cybersecurity. Here’s what we might expect.

You can find the full 2025 State of Malware report here.

****The generative AI non-revolution****

The November 2022 launch of ChatGPT ushered forth a new relationship with our computers. No longer would we need to use our laptops, smartphones, and tablets to record or assist our creative work. Now, we could make those same machines complete the creative work for us.

AI image tools like Midjourney and DALL-E can create images when given simple text prompts. They can even mimic the styles of famous artists, like Van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Picasso. AI chat tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude—from OpenAI competitor Anthropic—can brainstorm ideas for marketing materials, write book reports, compose poems, and even review human-written text for legibility. These tools can also answer an endless array of factual questions, much like the separate AI tool Perplexity, which advertises itself not as a “search engine,” but as the world’s first “answer engine.”

This is the potential of “generative AI,” a term used to describe AI tools that can generate text, images, movies, summaries, and more, limited only by our imagination.

But where has that imagination brought us?

For unimaginative users, generative AI has made it easier to cheat in college classes and to abuse social media engagement algorithms to gain brief virality—hardly inspiring. And for malicious users, hackers, and scammers, generative AI has delivered oil-slick efficiency to proven attack methods.

Generative AI tools can more convincingly write phishing emails so that the tell-tale signs of a scam—like misspellings and clumsy grammar—are all but gone. The same is true for all text-based social engineering tricks, as AI chat tools can write alluring direct messages for romance scams and craft urgent-sounding texts that can fool people into clicking on links that carry malware.

Importantly, the attack methods here are not new. Instead, they’ve simply become easier to scale with the use of AI. But sometimes the AI pushes back.

With limitless, advertised potential, even tools like ChatGPT have boundaries, often precluding users from producing materials that could cause harm. In 2023, Malwarebytes Labs subverted these boundaries to successfully get ChatGPT to write ransomware—twice.

Because of these prohibitive rules, a set of malicious copycat AI tools can now be found online that will produce text and images that often break the law. One example is in the creation of “deepfake nudes,” which utilize AI technology to digitally stitch the face of one person onto another person’s nude body, creating fake nude “photographs.” Deepfake nudes have caused multiple crises across high schools in America, serving as a new type of ammunition for old weaponry: Blackmail.

The ability to create false text, images, and even audio has also allowed cybercriminals to create more believable threats when fraudulently posing as CEOs or executives to convince employees to, say, sign a bogus contract or hand over a set of important account credentials.

These are real threats, but they are not novel. As we wrote in the 2025 State of Malware report:

“The limited impact of AI on malware stems from its current capabilities. Although there are notable exceptions, generative AIs tend to provide efficiency rather than brand new capabilities. Cybercrime is a very mature field that relies on a set of well-established tools, such as phishing, information stealers, and ransomware that are already feature complete.”

That could change in 2025.

****“Agentic” AI and a new landscape of attacks****

Agentic AI is the next big thing in artificial intelligence, even if you’ve never heard about it before.

Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and more have all begun experimenting with the technology, which promises to take AI out of its current chatbot silo and into a new landscape where individualized AI “agents” can help with specific tasks. These agents could, for example, more effectively respond to simple customer support questions, help patients find in-network providers with their health insurance, and even suggest strategy based on a company’s most recent performance. Microsoft, for its part, has already teased its AI agent that answers employee questions around HR policies, holiday schedules, and more. Salesforce, too, is investing heavily in agentic AI, positioning the technology as a personal assistant for everyone.

As we wrote in the 2025 State of Malware report:

> “If agentic AIs arrive in 2025, they won’t just answer questions, they will be able to think and act, transforming AI from an assistant that responds to prompts, into a peer, or even an expert that can plan out tasks, interact with the world, and solve the problems it encounters.”

The implications for cyberattacks are enormous. If put into the wrong hands, malicious attackers could ask AI agents to:

*   Search vast troves of stolen data to match leaked Social Security numbers with leaked email addresses, composing and sending phishing emails that threaten more data exposure unless a ransom is paid.
*   Scrape public social media feeds for baby photos that are delivered to other AI agents that create fake profiles that weaponize those baby photos as empty threats against a child’s safety.
*   Scour LinkedIn to create a database of potentially viable email addresses from countless companies by deducing the email address format—first name, last name; first initial, last name; etc.—from publicly listed email addresses, and then mirroring that format to write and send bogus requests from executives to their direct reports.
*   Comb through public divorce records across multiple states and countries to identify targets for romance scams, who receive messages and who can carry on with whole conversations composed and controlled by another AI agent.

These attacks threaten not only individuals but small businesses, too, as a vulnerability in a person’s device can become a malware attack on a network. The same is true in reverse—if attacks on companies become more accessible, then the data that people give these companies becomes more vulnerable to exposure.

Thankfully, where agentic AI poses a risk, it also poses a boon, as individual AI agents could be tasked with finding a company’s vulnerabilities, responding to suspicious activity on its network, and even guiding everyday people into safely posting online, searching the web, and buying from unknown retailers.

The truth is that AI is here to stay. There is already too much investment from the largest developers and companies for that to reverse course any time soon. So, if the threat is that attackers might harness this AI, then the foreseeable future will involve a lot of defenders and everyday people harnessing it, too.

**We don’t just report on threats—we remove them**

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

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