Threat actors leverage tax season to deploy tax-themed phishing campaigns www.microsoft.com/en-us/sec…

As Tax Day approaches in the United States on April 15, Microsoft has observed several phishing campaigns using tax-related themes for social engineering to steal credentials and deploy malware. These campaigns notably use redirection methods such as URL shorteners and QR codes contained in malicious attachments and abuse legitimate services like file-hosting services and business profile pages to avoid detection. These campaigns lead to phishing pages delivered via the RaccoonO365 phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform, remote access trojans (RATs) like Remcos, and other malware like Latrodectus, BruteRatel C4 (BRc4), AHKBot, and GuLoader.

Every year, threat actors use various social engineering techniques during tax season to steal personal and financial information, which can result in identity theft and monetary loss. These threat actors craft campaigns that mislead taxpayers into revealing sensitive information, making payments to fake services, or installing malicious payloads. Although these are well-known, longstanding techniques, they could still be highly effective if users and organizations don’t use advanced anti-phishing solutions and conduct user awareness and training.