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// #social-engineering

14 articles

🗄️ Assets

iRhythm Cardiac Monitoring Breach Exposes Patient PHI for 12 Million Zio Patch Wearers

iRhythm Holdings disclosed a data breach after social engineering granted attackers access to third-party systems hosting protected health information for approximately 12 million patients. A ransom demand was received on 9 June, and HIPAA breach notification timelines are now active for any covered entity whose patient data iRhythm processes.

#healthcare +5
🛡️ SecOps

UNC3753: Vishing Calls Combined With Physical Office Intrusions in U.S. Data Theft Extortion Campaign

Threat group UNC3753 has been documented combining voice phishing (vishing) with physical office intrusions to conduct data theft and extortion against U.S. organisations. The group uses vishing to gather employee credentials and facility access information, then deploys operatives physically to compromise targets. The hybrid TTPs represent a significant escalation in social engineering attack sophistication.

#unc3753 +7
🛡️ SecOps

KongTuke Initial Access Broker Pivots to Microsoft Teams Social Engineering — Five-Minute Corporate Compromise via ModeloRAT

Initial access broker KongTuke has updated its tradecraft to use Microsoft Teams as the primary social engineering vector, impersonating IT helpdesk personas to deliver ModeloRAT via Teams file transfers to targeted employees. The group achieves credential theft and establishes persistence within five minutes of initial Teams contact, then sells access to ransomware affiliates within 24 hours.

#kongtuke +4
🛡️ SecOps

Australia ACSC Warns of ClickFix Campaign Delivering Vidar Infostealer — Fake CAPTCHA Bypass Technique Targeting Enterprise Users

The Australian Cyber Security Centre has issued a warning about an active ClickFix social engineering campaign delivering Vidar infostealer malware. ClickFix presents victims with fake CAPTCHA or browser-fix dialogs that instruct them to run PowerShell commands, bypassing standard malware delivery defences. The campaign has been observed across multiple Australian industry sectors.

#clickfix +7
🛡️ SecOps

Calendly-Themed AiTM Phishing Kits Rise with Real-Time Socket.IO and Telegram Exfiltration

urlscan.io researchers have documented a surge in phishing kits impersonating Calendly booking pages, used as a step in multi-stage AiTM credential theft chains targeting enterprise users. The kits use real-time Socket.IO connections for live victim monitoring, fake CAPTCHA challenges for victim fingerprinting, and Telegram bot webhooks for credential exfiltration — a combination that makes the attack infrastructure highly operationally efficient while appearing to originate from legitimate Calendly sessions.

#phishing +8
⚖️ Risk Mgmt

Europol Dismantles €50M Crypto Investment Fraud Network — 12 Arrested Across Six Countries

Europol has coordinated the dismantling of a €50 million cryptocurrency investment fraud network operating across six European countries, resulting in 12 arrests, 30 property searches, and the seizure of cryptocurrency holdings, luxury assets, and fraud operation infrastructure. The network ran AI-enhanced investment scam call centres and operated fraudulent crypto trading platforms that fabricated returns to sustain victim investment before executing exit scams.

#europol +6
⚖️ Risk Mgmt

FBI Warns of $725M Cyber-Enabled Cargo Theft Wave Targeting Transportation and Logistics

The FBI has issued a warning documenting a sharp surge in cyber-enabled cargo theft targeting the US transportation and logistics industry, with losses exceeding $725 million in 2025. Criminal organisations use phishing, broker impersonation, and freight marketplace account takeovers to divert physical shipments. Supply chain security teams and freight brokers should treat this advisory as a direct threat to physical goods in transit.

#fbi-advisory +5
🔑 IAM

Scattered Spider's 'Tylerb' Pleads Guilty — Senior Member Faces 20 Years for $8M SIM Swap and Enterprise Breaches

Tyler Robert Buchanan, 24, known online as 'Tylerb', has pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft for his role in Scattered Spider's 2022 SMS phishing and SIM-swapping campaign that breached Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Cloudflare, and at least 130 other organisations. The guilty plea represents a significant law enforcement milestone against the English-language cybercrime group responsible for the MGM and Caesars casino breaches.

#scattered-spider +6
🗄️ Assets

ADT Confirms Customer Data Breach After ShinyHunters Vishing Attack on Help Desk

ADT, the US home and business security monitoring provider, has confirmed a data breach after ShinyHunters used voice phishing to social-engineer a support employee into granting access to customer management systems. Names, phone numbers, and account data were exfiltrated. The incident underlines how thoroughly attackers have made help desk social engineering a standard tool.

#data-breach +5
🛡️ SecOps

UNC6692 Abuses Microsoft Teams to Deliver SNOW Malware via IT Help Desk Vishing

Threat actor UNC6692 is impersonating IT help desk staff via Microsoft Teams to socially engineer victims into installing SNOW malware. The campaign exploits trusted internal communication channels where detection tooling is typically absent — immediate Teams external access policy review is recommended.

#social-engineering +4
🛡️ SecOps

North Korea's UNC4736 Spent Six Months Infiltrating Drift Protocol Before Stealing $285 Million

North Korean state hackers (UNC4736/AppleJeus) executed a meticulously planned six-month social engineering operation against Drift Protocol, culminating in a $285 million theft from the Solana DeFi platform on 1 April 2026. The attack leveraged fabricated tokens and pre-signed transactions to hand attackers admin control — the largest DeFi exploit of 2026 and the second-largest in Solana's history.

#north-korea +7
🛡️ SecOps

DPRK-Linked Hackers Steal $285 Million from Drift Protocol in Six-Month Social Engineering Operation

North Korean threat actors attributed to UNC4736 (Citrine Sleet/AppleJeus) stole $285 million from Solana-based Drift Protocol after a six-month infiltration campaign combining social engineering of multisig signers with a novel durable nonce pre-signing technique. The incident reveals social engineering tactics directly transferable to enterprise environments.

#north-korea +9
🛡️ SecOps

UAC-0255 Impersonates CERT-UA to Target Ukrainian Government, Healthcare, and Finance

Russian-linked threat actor UAC-0255 launched a targeted phishing campaign on 26–27 March posing as CERT-UA, Ukraine's national computer emergency response team, to deliver malware to state organisations, medical centres, financial institutions, and software development companies. The campaign uses CERT-UA brand authority to lower recipient suspicion of archive attachments containing remote access implants.

#ukraine +9
🗄️ Assets

ShinyHunters Claims Infinite Campus Breach — 11 Million Student Records at Risk

Infinite Campus, the K-12 student information system used by over 3,200 school districts across 46 US states, has warned customers of a security incident after ShinyHunters claimed to have stolen data via a Salesforce ticketing system compromise on 18 March. The company confirmed the attack lasted 38 minutes and primarily exposed school staff contact details, asserting no student database access occurred — but the threat actor's extortion deadline has passed without resolution.

#data-breach +7

Commentary tagged #social-engineering

Opinion

Security Awareness Training Was Built to Spot Bad Phishing — AI Has Made That Irrelevant

The FTC's $2.1 billion social media fraud figure is not a user education failure. It is evidence that the threat model security awareness training was designed for no longer exists. AI-generated fraud does not produce the observable cues our training teaches users to detect — and the industry needs to acknowledge this before it spends another decade on the wrong solution.

CipherWatch Editorial

Security Intelligence Platform