Security Articles

Most phishing websites are little more than static copies of login pages for popular online destinations, and they are often quickly taken down by anti-abuse activists and security firms. But a stealthy new phishing-as-a-service offering lets customers sidestep both of these pitfalls: It uses cleverly disguised links to load the target brand’s real website, and then acts as a relay between the target and the legitimate site — forwarding the victim’s username, password and multi-factor authentication (MFA) code to the legitimate site and returning its responses. There are countless phishing kits that would-be scammers can use to get started, but successfully wielding them requires some modicum of skill in configuring servers, domain names, certificates, proxy services, and other repetitive tech drudgery. Enter Starkiller , a new phishing service that dynamically loads a live copy of the real login page and records everything the user types, proxying the data from the legitimate site back to the victim. According to an analysis of Starkiller by the security firm Abnormal AI , the service lets customers select a brand to impersonate (e.g., Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft et. al.) and generates a deceptive URL that visually mimics the legitimate domain while routing traffic through the attacker’s infrastructure. For example, a phishing link targeting Microsoft customers appears as “login.microsoft.com@[malicious/shortened URL here].” The “@” sign in the link trick is an oldie but goodie, because everything before the “@” in a URL is considered username data, and the real landing page is what comes after the “@” sign. Here’s what it looks like in the target’s browser: Image: Abnormal AI. The actual malicious landing page is blurred out in this picture, but we can see it ends in .ru. The service also offers the ability to insert links from different URL-shortening services. Once Starkiller customers select the URL to be phished, the service spins up a Docker container running a headless Chrome browser instance that loads the real login page, Abnormal found. “The container then acts as a man-in-the-middle reverse proxy, forwarding the end user’s inputs to the legitimate site and returning the site’s responses,” Abnormal researchers Callie Baron and Piotr Wojtyla wrote in a blog post on Thursday . “Every keystroke, form submission, and session token passes through attacker-controlled infrastructure and is logged along the way.” Starkiller in effect offers cybercriminals real-time session monitoring, allowing them to live-stream the target’s screen as they interact with the phishing page, the researchers said. “The platform also includes keylogger capture for every keystroke, cookie and session token theft for direct account takeover, geo-tracking of targets, and automated Telegram alerts when new credentials come in,” they wrote. “Campaign analytics round out the operator experience with visit counts, conversion rates, and performance graphs—the same kind of metrics dashboard a legitimate SaaS [software-as-a-service] platform would offer.” Abnormal said the service also deftly intercepts and relays the victim’s MFA credentials, since the recipient who clicks the link is actually authenticating with the real site through a proxy, and any authentication tokens submitted are then forwarded to the legitimate service in real time. “The attacker captures the resulting session cookies and tokens, giving them authenticated access to the account,” the researchers wrote. “When attackers relay the entire authentication flow in real time, MFA protections can be effectively neutralized despite functioning exactly as designed.” The “URL Masker” feature of the Starkiller phishing service features options for configuring the malicious link. Image: Abnormal. Starkiller is just one of several cybercrime services offered by a threat group calling itself Jinkusu , which maintains an active user forum where customers can discuss techniques, request features and troubleshoot deployments. One a-la-carte feature will harvest email addresses and contact information from compromised sessions, and advises the data can be used to build target lists for follow-on phishing campaigns. This service strikes me as a remarkable evolution in phishing, and its apparent success is likely to be copied by other enterprising cybercriminals (assuming the service performs as well as it claims). After all, phishing users this way avoids the upfront costs and constant hassles associated with juggling multiple phishing domains, and it throws a wrench in traditional phishing detection methods like domain blocklisting and static page analysis. It also massively lowers the barrier to entry for novice cybercriminals, Abnormal researchers observed. “Starkiller represents a significant escalation in phishing infrastructure, reflecting a broader trend toward commoditized, enterprise-style cybercrime tooling,” their report concludes. “Combined with URL masking, session hijacking, and MFA bypass, it gives low-skill cybercriminals access to attack capabilities that were previously out of reach.”

ABA is supporting a Senate bill to ensure that robberies of off-site ATMs carry the same legal consequences as bank robberies. The post Bill would strengthen criminal penalties for ATM robberies appeared first on ABA Banking Journal .

Minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee, January 27–28, 2026

The largest U.S. lender flagged the Carolinas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Massachusetts and Tennessee as states where it’s planning “major expansion” this year.

FinCEN has launched a new dedicated webpage to confidentially accept whistleblower tips on fraud, money laundering and sanctions violations. The post FinCEN launches online portal for whistleblower tips appeared first on ABA Banking Journal .

The Senate adjourned without reaching a funding deal for the Department of Homeland Security, meaning a limited shutdown affecting only the department is likely start on Saturday, although the shutdown shouldn’t immediately affect the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the National Flood Insurance Program. The post Senate fails to reach funding deal on DHS appeared first on ABA Banking Journal .

While artificial intelligence is widely used for fraud and scams, fraudsters are getting increasingly frustrated with detection systems used by banks and other organizations to to spot use of the technology, according to a new report on the global state of fraud by LexisNexis. The post Report: Deepfake detection efforts foiling fraudsters appeared first on ABA Banking Journal .

The FDIC and OCC released the market scenarios they will use in their upcoming stress tests for financial institutions. The agencies coordinated with the Federal Reserve to develop the scenarios, with the Fed releasing its scenarios last week. The post FDIC, OCC release stress test scenarios appeared first on ABA Banking Journal .

The companies aim to simplify the account verification process for JPMorgan Chase customers.

For the past week, the massive “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet known as Kimwolf has been disrupting The Invisible Internet Project (I2P), a decentralized, encrypted communications network designed to anonymize and secure online communications. I2P users started reporting disruptions in the network around the same time the Kimwolf botmasters began relying on it to evade takedown attempts against the botnet’s control servers. Kimwolf is a botnet that surfaced in late 2025 and quickly infected millions of systems, turning poorly secured IoT devices like TV streaming boxes, digital picture frames and routers into relays for malicious traffic and abnormally large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. I2P is a decentralized, privacy-focused network that allows people to communicate and share information anonymously. “It works by routing data through multiple encrypted layers across volunteer-operated nodes, hiding both the sender’s and receiver’s locations,” the I2P website explains . “The result is a secure, censorship-resistant network designed for private websites, messaging, and data sharing.” On February 3, I2P users began complaining on the organization’s GitHub page about tens of thousands of routers suddenly overwhelming the network, preventing existing users from communicating with legitimate nodes. Users reported a rapidly increasing number of new routers joining the network that were unable to transmit data, and that the mass influx of new systems had overwhelmed the network to the point where users could no longer connect. I2P users complaining about service disruptions from a rapidly increasing number of routers suddenly swamping the network. When one I2P user asked whether the network was under attack, another user replied, “Looks like it. My physical router freezes when the number of connections exceeds 60,000.” A graph shared by I2P developers showing a marked drop in successful connections on the I2P network around the time the Kimwolf botnet started trying to use the network for fallback communications. The same day that I2P users began noticing the outages, the individuals in control of Kimwolf posted to their Discord channel that they had accidentally disrupted I2P after attempting to join 700,000 Kimwolf-infected bots as nodes on the network. The Kimwolf botmaster openly discusses what they are doing with the botnet in a Discord channel with my name on it. Although Kimwolf is known as a potent weapon for launching DDoS attacks, the outages caused this week by some portion of the botnet attempting to join I2P are what’s known as a “ Sybil attack ,” a threat in peer-to-peer networks where a single entity can disrupt the system by creating, controlling, and operating a large number of fake, pseudonymous identities. Indeed, the number of Kimwolf-infected routers that tried to join I2P this past week was many times the network’s normal size. I2P’s Wikipedia page says the network consists of roughly 55,000 computers distributed throughout the world, with each participant acting as both a router (to relay traffic) and a client. However, Lance James , founder of the New York City based cybersecurity consultancy Unit 221B and the original founder of I2P, told KrebsOnSecurity the entire I2P network now consists of between 15,000 and 20,000 devices on any given day. An I2P user posted this graph on Feb. 10, showing tens of thousands of routers — mostly from the United States — suddenly attempting to join the network. Benjamin Brundage is founder of Synthient , a startup that tracks proxy services and was the first to document Kimwolf’s unique spreading techniques . Brundage said the Kimwolf operator(s) have been trying to build a command and control network that can’t easily be taken down by security companies and network operators that are working together to combat the spread of the botnet. Brundage said the people in control of Kimwolf have been experimenting with using I2P and a similar anonymity network — Tor — as a backup command and control network, although there have been no reports of widespread disruptions in the Tor network recently. “I don’t think their goal is to take I2P down,” he said. “It’s more they’re looking for an alternative to keep the botnet stable in the face of takedown attempts.” The Kimwolf botnet created challenges for Cloudflare late last year when it began instructing millions of infected devices to use Cloudflare’s domain name system (DNS) settings, causing control domains associated with Kimwolf to repeatedly usurp Amazon ,  Apple ,  Google  and  Microsoft in Cloudflare’s public ranking of the most frequently requested websites. James said the I2P network is still operating at about half of its normal capacity, and that a new release is rolling out which should bring some stability improvements over the next week for users. Meanwhile, Brundage said the good news is Kimwolf’s overlords appear to have quite recently alienated some of their more competent developers and operators, leading to a rookie mistake this past week that caused the botnet’s overall numbers to drop by more than 600,000 infected systems. “It seems like they’re just testing stuff, like running experiments in production,” he said. “But the botnet’s numbers are dropping significantly now, and they don’t seem to know what they’re doing.”

The institution-focused crypto lender has also restricted trading but has not given a timeline for when normal activity will resume. Nor has it given a reason for the precaution beyond market volatility.

Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 50 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including patches for a whopping six “zero-day” vulnerabilities that attackers are already exploiting in the wild. Zero-day #1 this month is CVE-2026-21510 , a security feature bypass vulnerability in Windows Shell wherein a single click on a malicious link can quietly bypass Windows protections and run attacker-controlled content without warning or consent dialogs. CVE-2026-21510 affects all currently supported versions of Windows. The zero-day flaw  CVE-2026-21513 is a security bypass bug targeting MSHTML , the proprietary engine of the default Web browser in Windows. CVE-2026-21514 is a related security feature bypass in Microsoft Word. The zero-day CVE-2026-21533 allows local attackers to elevate their user privileges to “SYSTEM” level access in Windows Remote Desktop Services . CVE-2026-21519 is a zero-day elevation of privilege flaw in the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), a key component of Windows that organizes windows on a user’s screen. Microsoft fixed a different zero-day in DWM just last month . The sixth zero-day is CVE-2026-21525 , a potentially disruptive denial-of-service vulnerability in the Windows Remote Access Connection Manager , the service responsible for maintaining VPN connections to corporate networks. Chris Goettl at Ivanti reminds us Microsoft has issued several out-of-band security updates since January’s Patch Tuesday. On January 17, Microsoft pushed a fix that resolved a credential prompt failure when attempting remote desktop or remote application connections. On January 26, Microsoft patched a zero-day security feature bypass vulnerability ( CVE-2026-21509 ) in Microsoft Office . Kev Breen at Immersive notes that this month’s Patch Tuesday includes several fixes for remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting GitHub Copilot and multiple integrated development environments (IDEs), including VS Code , Visual Studio , and JetBrains products. The relevant CVEs are CVE-2026-21516 , CVE-2026-21523 , and CVE-2026-21256 . Breen said the AI vulnerabilities Microsoft patched this month stem from a command injection flaw that can be triggered through prompt injection, or tricking the AI agent into doing something it shouldn’t — like executing malicious code or commands. “Developers are high-value targets for threat actors, as they often have access to sensitive data such as API keys and secrets that function as keys to critical infrastructure, including privileged AWS or Azure API keys,” Breen said. “When organizations enable developers and automation pipelines to use LLMs and agentic AI, a malicious prompt can have significant impact. This does not mean organizations should stop using AI. It does mean developers should understand the risks, teams should clearly identify which systems and workflows have access to AI agents, and least-privilege principles should be applied to limit the blast radius if developer secrets are compromised.” The  SANS Internet Storm Center  has a  clickable breakdown of each individual fix this month from Microsoft, indexed by severity and CVSS score. Enterprise Windows admins involved in testing patches before rolling them out should keep an eye on askwoody.com , which often has the skinny on wonky updates. Please don’t neglect to back up your data if it has been a while since you’ve done that, and feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience problems installing any of these fixes.

Lawmakers reauthorized a voluntary framework for the private sector and government agencies to share information about cyberthreats as part of a larger budget deal. The post Congress reauthorizes private-public cybersecurity framework appeared first on ABA Banking Journal .

The financial services firm is seeing AI adoption increase across its operations, according to CEO Sergio Ermotti.

Senthil Kumar will become Huntington’s CRO as it transitions to a Category III bank, with higher liquidity requirements and capital buffers and more frequent stress tests.

Columbia Bank and Northfield Bank will combine to create a bank with $18 billion in assets, bringing Columbia’s footprint into New York state for the first time.

The bank’s CTO, David Griffiths, said Spaces will help teams work together on projects within the company’s AI platform.

Under the agreement, the Department of Homeland Security will receive less than two weeks of stopgap funding while lawmakers and the White House continue to negotiate policy changes involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post House passes budget deal, ending partial shutdown appeared first on ABA Banking Journal .

Prosperity Bancshares has agreed to buy Stellar Bancorp in Houston. Also, Stock Yards Bancorp has agreed to buy Field and Main Bancorp in Kentucky. The post Prosperity to buy Stellar Bancorp in Texas appeared first on ABA Banking Journal .

The acquisition would create a top-10 retail and commercial bank in the U.S. by assets and a top-five deposit franchise across key states in the Northeast, the banks said Tuesday.

A prolific data ransom gang that calls itself Scattered Lapsus ShinyHunters (SLSH) has a distinctive playbook when it seeks to extort payment from victim firms: Harassing, threatening and even swatting executives and their families, all while notifying journalists and regulators about the extent of the intrusion. Some victims reportedly are paying — perhaps as much to contain the stolen data as to stop the escalating personal attacks. But a top SLSH expert warns that engaging at all beyond a “We’re not paying” response only encourages further harassment, noting that the group’s fractious and unreliable history means the only winning move is not to pay. Image: Shutterstock.com, @Mungujakisa Unlike traditional, highly regimented Russia-based ransomware affiliate groups, SLSH is an unruly and somewhat fluid English-language extortion gang that appears uninterested in building a reputation of consistent behavior whereby victims might have some measure of confidence that the criminals will keep their word if paid. That’s according to Allison Nixon , director of research at the New York City based security consultancy Unit 221B . Nixon has been closely tracking the criminal group and individual members as they bounce between various Telegram channels used to extort and harass victims, and she said SLSH differs from traditional data ransom groups in other important ways that argue against trusting them to do anything they say they’ll do — such as destroying stolen data. Like SLSH, many traditional Russian ransomware groups have employed high-pressure tactics to force payment in exchange for a decryption key and/or a promise to delete stolen data, such as publishing a dark web shaming blog with samples of stolen data next to a countdown clock, or notifying journalists and board members of the victim company. But Nixon said the extortion from SLSH quickly escalates way beyond that — to threats of physical violence against executives and their families, DDoS attacks on the victim’s website, and repeated email-flooding campaigns. SLSH is known for breaking into companies by phishing employees over the phone, and using the purloined access to steal sensitive internal data. In a January 30 blog post , Google’s security forensics firm Mandiant said SLSH’s most recent extortion attacks stem from incidents spanning early to mid-January 2026, when SLSH members pretended to be IT staff and called employees at targeted victim organizations claiming that the company was updating MFA settings. “The threat actor directed the employees to victim-branded credential harvesting sites to capture their SSO credentials and MFA codes, and then registered their own device for MFA,” the blog post explained. Victims often first learn of the breach when their brand name is uttered on whatever ephemeral new public Telegram group chat SLSH is using to threaten, extort and harass their prey. According to Nixon, the coordinated harassment on the SLSH Telegram channels is part of a well-orchestrated strategy to overwhelm the victim organization by manufacturing humiliation that pushes them over the threshold to pay. Nixon said multiple executives at targeted organizations have been subject to “swatting” attacks, wherein SLSH communicated a phony bomb threat or hostage situation at the target’s address in the hopes of eliciting a heavily armed police response at their home or place of work. “A big part of what they’re doing to victims is the psychological aspect of it, like harassing executives’ kids and threatening the board of the company,” Nixon told KrebsOnSecurity. “And while these victims are getting extortion demands, they’re simultaneously getting outreach from media outlets saying, ‘Hey, do you have any comments on the bad things we’re going to write about you.” In a blog post today , Unit 221B argues that no one should negotiate with SLSH because the group has demonstrated a willingness to extort victims based on promises that it has no intention to keep. Nixon points out that all of SLSH’s known members hail from The Com , shorthand for a constellation of cybercrime-focused Discord and Telegram communities which serve as a kind of distributed social network that facilitates instant collaboration . Nixon said Com-based extortion groups tend to instigate feuds and drama between group members, leading to lying, betrayals, credibility destroying behavior, backstabbing, and sabotaging each other. “With this type of ongoing dysfunction, often compounding by substance abuse, these threat actors often aren’t able to act with the core goal in mind of completing a successful, strategic ransom operation,” Nixon wrote. “They continually lose control with outbursts that put their strategy and operational security at risk, which severely limits their ability to build a professional, scalable, and sophisticated criminal organization network for continued successful ransoms – unlike other, more tenured and professional criminal organizations focused on ransomware alone.” Intrusions from established ransomware groups typically center around encryption/decryption malware that mostly stays on the affected machine. In contrast, Nixon said, ransom from a Com group is often structured the same as violent sextortion schemes against minors, wherein members of The Com will steal damaging information, threaten to release it, and “promise” to delete it if the victim complies without any guarantee or technical proof point that they will keep their word. She writes: A key component of SLSH’s efforts to convince victims to pay, Nixon said, involves manipulating the media into hyping the threat posed by this group. This approach also borrows a page from the playbook of sextortion attacks, she said, which encourages predators to keep targets continuously engaged and worrying about the consequences of non-compliance. “On days where SLSH had no substantial criminal ‘win’ to announce, they focused on announcing death threats and harassment to keep law enforcement, journalists, and cybercrime industry professionals focused on this group,” she said. An excerpt from a sextortion tutorial from a Com-based Telegram channel. Image: Unit 221B. Nixon knows a thing or two about being threatened by SLSH: For the past several months, the group’s Telegram channels have been replete with threats of physical violence against her, against Yours Truly, and against other security researchers. These threats, she said, are just another way the group seeks to generate media attention and achieve a veneer of credibility, but they are useful as indicators of compromise because SLSH members tend to name drop and malign security researchers even in their communications with victims. “Watch for the following behaviors in their communications to you or their public statements,” Unit 221B’s advisory reads. “Repeated abusive mentions of Allison Nixon (or “A.N”), Unit 221B, or cybersecurity journalists—especially Brian Krebs—or any other cybersecurity employee, or cybersecurity company. Any threats to kill, or commit terrorism, or violence against internal employees, cybersecurity employees, investigators, and journalists.” Unit 221B says that while the pressure campaign during an extortion attempt may be traumatizing to employees, executives, and their family members, entering into drawn-out negotiations with SLSH incentivizes the group to increase the level of harm and risk, which could include the physical safety of employees and their families. “The breached data will never go back to the way it was, but we can assure you that the harassment will end,” Nixon said. “So, your decision to pay should be a separate issue from the harassment. We believe that when you separate these issues, you will objectively see that the best course of action to protect your interests, in both the short and long term, is to refuse payment.”

FiCare Federal Credit Union said hackers breached an online banking platform that Fiserv provides and stole members’ money. The credit union alleges Fiserv then told customers it would charge them for a security upgrade.

Financial services remained the top target for data breaches in 2025, and while the overall number of breaches continues to rise, attackers are more selective in who they set their sights on, according to the annual data breach report by the Identity Theft Resource Center. The post Report: Data breaches becoming more focused appeared first on ABA Banking Journal .