Article
Phishing-as-a-Service Evolves with Venom
Arete Analysis
Cybersecurity Trends
“Whaling” has taken on a new meaning with a highly targeted phishing campaign active from November 2025 through March 2026, aimed exclusively at senior executives from more than 20 industries. The campaign, dubbed VENOM, is a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform that combines advanced evasion capabilities with immediate persistence of targeted executives. The initial phish impersonates an internal SharePoint document notification and uses embedded QR codes to convince victims to shift to unmanaged mobile devices to bypass corporate security controls. VENOM aims to establish persistence immediately by either registering a new MFA device or retaining long-lived refresh tokens, allowing threat actors to maintain access even after password resets or other base-level remediation efforts.
What’s Notable and Unique
This campaign is unique in its targeted nature of the PhaaS platform rather than broad, sweeping attempts. The threat actors behind VENOM create convincing phishing emails that impersonate SharePoint activity using the victim’s own domain, company name, and even fabricated email threads. These convincing social engineering tactics, combined with the specific targeting of executives, make this an effective capability for cybercriminals.
VENOM operates as a closed-access system, with full adversarial support, but has no public visibility on the dark web or from security researchers. The service likely operates on an invite-only basis, unlike most PhaaS platforms, which typically seek to have as many paying customers as possible. This, among other items such as the sophisticated evasion techniques, indicates a higher degree of sophistication than most other PhaaS offerings.
Either through MFA enrollment or Microsoft Device Code abuse, the threat actor forces the victim to aid them in establishing persistence early in the attack lifecycle. These tactics result in either valid tokens or an additional MFA login method controlled by the threat actor, meaning typical password resets alone are not effective against this technique. Administrators would be required to explicitly revoke sessions and token grants to mitigate the threat actors’ persistence.
Analyst Comments
Oftentimes, MFA is viewed as a one-stop shop to cybersecurity, but tactics such as this show how threat actors can bypass MFA, or worse, use it to establish persistence. Ultimately, this campaign highlights how modern attacks increasingly abuse legitimate authentication workflows rather than attempting to defeat them outright. Defenses that rely solely on MFA without other security posturing, such as continuous session monitoring, token revocation, and identity logging, can leave organizations vulnerable. As attackers shift toward token theft and device trust abuse, incident response and identity security strategies must evolve accordingly.
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Article
Threat Actors Leverage AI for EDR Evasion
A threat actor has developed and deployed a ransomware attack toolkit enhanced with AI-assisted development workflows, enabling automated Active Directory (AD) discovery and improved EDR evasion capabilities. The toolkit leverages agent-based AI systems, such as Claude’s Opus and Cursor agents, for iterative malware development, testing, and refinement.
What’s Notable and Unique
Researchers have highlighted that this toolkit can not only generate ransomware code but also bypass sophisticated security defenses and identify AD networks for malware distribution.
The framework incorporates multiple capabilities, including automated AD discovery and reconnaissance mechanisms, iterative EDR testing environments to refine evasion techniques, and a command-and-control (C2) infrastructure that leverages Telegram APIs and Cloudflare redirectors for stealth.
Additionally, some agents were tasked with checking security research and technical posts for various bypass techniques. The agents recognized what was required for reproduction, extracted the techniques, mapped them to the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base of adversary behaviors, set up a test lab, carried out the methodology, and reported the results.
After a few repetitions, the modules seemed to avoid nearly all EDR solutions, despite the agent’s initial suggestion of a high failure rate. Although researchers found no evidence that AI was embedded in deployed malware or was operating independently in victim environments, the technology was still used to accelerate the iterative process of developing, testing, and refining payloads against security products, shortening the period between the publication of offensive security research and its practical implementation by threat actors.
Analyst Comments
AI-driven tools like this could accelerate the pace and sophistication of ransomware attacks, enabling even relatively inexperienced actors to launch high-impact campaigns. This development underscores the urgent need for security solutions to adapt to AI-assisted threats. Organizations must respond by strengthening detection engineering, improving visibility across environments, and maintaining robust security fundamentals.
Sources
AI-built ransomware toolkit automates EDR evasion, AD discovery
Pointing a Cursor at evading detection
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Article
CMS Vulnerability Leads to ClickFix Campaign
Threat actors compromised at least 700 education and technology websites in a recent ClickFix campaign by exploiting a critical SQL injection flaw (CVE-2026-26980) in the Ghost content management system (CMS). Adversaries combined the vulnerability with the ClickFix social engineering tactic to steal admin keys and inject a malicious JavaScript that delivers a fake Cloudflare or CAPTCHA verification pop-up, tricking victims into copying and pasting a malicious command into their systems.
What’s Notable and Unique
Rather than targeting the end user first, this campaign is unique in its initial exploitation of the system, followed by social engineering attempts. This hybrid attack style is likely being leveraged to bypass traditional defenses.
This recent campaign also highlights how trusted web properties can be weaponized at scale and coupled with unpatched CMS vulnerabilities. Rather than using the CMS compromise to perpetrate a single attack, threat actors turned it into a supply-chain attack that ultimately affected over 700 trusted websites.
Analyst Comments
As network defenders and their tools enhance threat detection capabilities, adversaries increasingly seek methods to bypass these defenses. By combining vulnerability exploitation, social engineering techniques, and staging for ancillary attacks, this campaign successfully bypassed traditional defenses and inflicted significant impact. Defending against hybrid cyberattacks requires comprehensive security controls beyond simply patching vulnerabilities. Organizations should focus on limiting movement within the environment, detecting abuse of trusted applications, and preventing end-user manipulation.
Sources
700+ education and tech websites hijacked in huge ClickFix malware campaign
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Article
Threat Actors Leverage Fake JPEG Files for Initial Access
In a recent campaign, researchers observed threat actors using fake JPEG image files as a delivery mechanism to initiate the deployment of additional malicious components. The false JPEG files are typically distributed via phishing emails or other social engineering-based lures, and are actually PowerShell-based malware that deploys a trojanized version of ConnectWise ScreenConnect to establish and maintain persistence in the compromised environment.
What’s Notable and Unique
This campaign leverages JPEG images as the initial lure, where the images are not merely decoys but part of the infection workflow. Victims are typically led to download or open an image that triggers hidden execution logic or redirects them to a payload-delivery sequence that initiates later stages of the intrusion chain.
The attack chain is designed to blend into legitimate environments, making detection more difficult. Execution typically relies on scripted or native Windows components, often including PowerShell or other living-off-the-land binaries, enabling fileless or near-fileless execution and reducing forensic artifacts on disk.
The multistage design ensures that the initial JPEG does not directly contain the full payload but instead triggers retrieval or decryption steps that progressively assemble the final malicious components in memory.
Analyst Comments
This campaign illustrates how threat actors continue to blur the line between legitimate file handling and malicious execution chains, indicating potential overlap with remote management or administrative tooling. The use of JPEG-based staging combined with script-based execution reflects a broader evolution toward a stealth-first intrusion design, in which file formats serve as triggers rather than payload containers.
Sources
OPERATION SILENTCANVAS : JPEG BASED MULTISTAGE POWERSHELL INTRUSION