Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a brand new marketing campaign that is focusing on Portuguese-speaking customers in Brazil with trial variations of business distant monitoring and administration (RMM) software program since January 2025.
“The spam message makes use of the Brazilian digital bill system, NF-e, as a lure to entice customers into clicking hyperlinks and accessing malicious content material hosted in Dropbox,” Cisco Talos researcher Guilherme Venere mentioned in a Thursday report.
The assault chains start with specifically crafted spam emails that declare to originate from monetary establishments or cellphone carriers, warning of overdue payments or excellent funds so as to trick customers into clicking on bogus Dropbox hyperlinks that time to a binary installer for the RMM software.
Two notable RMM instruments noticed are N-able RMM Distant Entry and PDQ Join, granting attackers the flexibility to learn and write recordsdata to the distant file system.
In some circumstances, the risk actors then use the distant capabilities of those brokers to obtain and set up a further RMM software program reminiscent of ScreenConnect after the preliminary compromise.
Primarily based on the widespread recipients noticed, the marketing campaign has been discovered to primarily goal C-level executives and monetary and human assets account throughout a number of industries, together with some academic and authorities establishments.
It has additionally been assessed with excessive confidence that the exercise is the work of an preliminary entry dealer (IAB) that is abusing the free trial intervals related to varied RMM packages to achieve unauthorized entry. N-able has since taken steps to disable the affected trial accounts.
“Adversaries’ abuse of business RMM instruments has steadily elevated in recent times,” Venere mentioned. “These instruments are of curiosity to risk actors as a result of they’re often digitally signed by acknowledged entities and are a totally featured backdoor.”
“Additionally they have little to no price in software program or infrastructure, as all of that is typically offered by the trial model software.”
The event comes amid the emergence of assorted phishing campaigns which might be engineered to sidestep trendy defenses and propagate a variety of malware households, or accumulate victims’ credentials –
- A marketing campaign carried out by a South American cybercrime group referred to as Hive0148 to distribute the Grandoreiro banking trojan to customers in customers in Mexico and Costa Rica.
- A marketing campaign that employs a reputable file-sharing service named GetShared to bypass safety protections and direct customers to hyperlinks internet hosting malware
- A marketing campaign that makes use of gross sales order-themed lures to ship the Formbook malware via a Microsoft Phrase doc that is vulnerable to a years-old flaw in Equation Editor (CVE-2017-11882)
- A marketing campaign that has focused organizations in Spain, Italy, and Portugal utilizing invoice-related themes to deploy a Java-based distant entry trojan named Ratty RAT that may execute distant instructions, log keystrokes, seize screenshots, and steal delicate knowledge
- A marketing campaign that makes use of a reputable note-taking software referred to as Milanote and an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing equipment dubbed Tycoon 2FA to seize customers’ credentials below the guise of viewing a “new settlement”
- Campaigns that make the most of encoded JavaScript inside SVG recordsdata, booby-trapped hyperlinks in PDF attachments, dynamic phishing URLs which might be rendered at runtime inside OneDrive-hosted recordsdata, and archived MHT payloads inside OpenXML constructions to direct customers to credential harvesting or phishing pages
- Campaigns that abuse Cloudflare’s TryCloudflare tunneling characteristic to deploy malware like AsyncRAT
“Attackers repeatedly evolve techniques to bypass trendy electronic mail and endpoint safety options, making detecting and mitigating phishing makes an attempt more and more troublesome,” Intezer researcher Yuval Guri famous final month. “And regardless of developments in cybersecurity instruments, many phishing campaigns nonetheless efficiently attain customers’ inboxes.”
