Password Spraying Campaign Targets AWS Root Accounts in Over 150 Organizations
A password spraying campaign targeted AWS root accounts across more than 150 organizations between July 24 and August 23, 2026. The attacks involved repeated login attempts against identities holding maximum privileges in the cloud.
The root account is created with every AWS account and provides complete access to resources, configurations, billing details, and sensitive administrative functions. A successful compromise could grant broad control over the entire environment.
Researchers recorded a median of two attempts per organization, while some targets received as many as eight attempts. No successful authentications connected to the campaign have been identified to date.
In password spraying, criminals test a small set of common or previously leaked passwords against many accounts. This approach reduces the volume of attempts per user and can evade traditional lockout mechanisms.
The attacks utilized proxies distributed across different countries and networks, including hosting infrastructure and residential proxies. Attackers also employed user agents simulating older versions of Microsoft Edge and Firefox.
To access a root account via the console, an attacker must know the associated email address. This suggests the operators may have obtained such information from prior leaks, reconnaissance, or by testing corporate email lists.
Since June 2025, AWS has required multi-factor authentication for root users, increasing the difficulty of account takeover even when a password is discovered. The company also recommends avoiding everyday use of the root identity and refraining from creating permanent access keys for it.
Related articles
Scammers Impersonate Social Fund to Threaten Child Benefit Cancellation and Steal Savings
Fraudsters have launched a new social engineering campaign targeting parents by impersonating officials from Russia's Social Fund. Callers claim that suspicious transfers have been detected on family accounts and threaten the cancellation of child benefits unless savings are moved to a special transit account. The scheme relies on fabricated rules about income assessment and uses the promise of an 'unreported' account to trick victims into sending money. The Narodny Front's Moshelovka platform, cited by RIA Novosti, confirms that the Social Fund never requests transfers to third-party accounts for benefit verification. Families are instructed to check official notifications exclusively through Gosuslugi or by visiting an SFR office in person. Authentication codes from government services or banking apps must never be shared over the phone.
Silent Call Answering on Android: Defeating Phone Spam by Removing Human Attention
A detailed proposal suggests abandoning traditional spam call blocking in favor of allowing all incoming calls to connect automatically while keeping them invisible to the user. The approach uses Android's Telecom Framework and InCallService to answer calls silently without ringing, notifications, or screen activation. This breaks the economic model of mass dialing systems by inflating answered call metrics with empty connections that contain no human. The concept separates the technical establishment of a call from delivering user attention, forcing spammers to detect real people after the connection is made. Implementation requires the app to hold the ROLE_DIALER role and selectively invoke Call.answer() based on custom rules instead of always showing the incoming call UI. The author argues this shifts the detection burden onto robocall platforms and reduces the value of every successful connection.
Telegram Scam Bot Exposed by Fixed Timer and Deleted Messages in Telethon Userbot Analysis
A detailed investigation into a romance scam attempt on Telegram revealed an AI-driven userbot masquerading as a woman named Maria from Yaroslavl. The bot maintained consistent 4-5 minute response delays regardless of message length or time of day, responded to deleted messages, and accumulated multiple inputs before replying in batches. It refused out-of-character requests using repetitive phrases like "I am not a..." and handed off media or confusing inputs to a human operator. The bot failed to react to a nonexistent city name and ignored voice messages containing silence, leading to delayed human intervention. The chat was later deleted from the scammer side after testing, and the account ignored messages from a second profile. The analysis includes a full reconstruction of the bot's logic using the Telethon library, highlighting prompt protections against jailbreaks and reliance on fixed delays.
CACTER Upgrades PhishSim Anti-Phishing Simulation System to Reduce Employee Click Rates
CACTER has released an updated version of its PhishSim anti-phishing training platform that allows organizations to run realistic simulated attacks in just four steps. The system replicates common phishing vectors including malicious links, infected attachments, and disguised QR codes while spoofing sender addresses and official domains. Organizations can draw from a continuously refreshed template library covering invoices, financial subsidies, system notifications, and industry-specific scenarios. After each campaign the platform produces detailed visual reports that rank departments, classify employee risk levels, and recommend concrete remediation steps. Long-term use of the platform has been shown to lower average click rates from 23.88 percent to 4.16 percent. The solution is designed for immediate deployment without requiring dedicated security staff.