Phishing Sites Impersonate AI Chatbot Ads to Steal Logins — SkimNews
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- Island researchers Oleg Zaytsev and Ofek Ronen disclosed a human-operated phishing platform impersonating ad products for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Meta Muse, and Manus, with each brand receiving a tailored pitch and sign-in flow.
- The phishing sites use the browser-in-the-browser (BitB) technique, drawing a fake window with a legitimate-looking address bar (e.g., accounts.google.com) inside the real browser to capture passwords and let operators choose the MFA challenge the victim sees.
- The 'museads.ai' portal appeared on September 16, 2026, roughly a week after Meta launched its Muse AI agent, and targets Google, Meta, TikTok, and Okta credentials while fingerprinting devices via a Socket.IO endpoint at '/api/send/ip'.
- The broader platform runs three concurrent operations — AI ads portals, Google Ads-themed refund and payment scams, and recruitment lures for Tesla, Louis Vuitton, Nike, and Adecco — all built on the same Next.js and Socket.IO stack.
- The attackers exposed source code for earlier versions of the platform through misconfigured public GitHub repositories, and the campaign specifically targets agency staff, media buyers, and manager-account administrators to monetize or resell ad accounts with clean spend history.
- A separate Island finding shows threat actors abusing Google-sponsored search results to route users through custom GPTs and shared-AI chat content to fake Cloudflare verification pages delivering NetSupport RAT, spanning roughly 850 paid-ad landings, 26 lookalike ChatGPT destinations, and 71 Google Ads campaign IDs over a three-month window ending August 2026.
Why it matters: Phishing operations are industrializing the theft of ad accounts, which carry clean spending reputations and are resold on underground markets; Mimecast's July 2026 report cited families like DuckTail and NodeStealer as fueling a 'widespread commodity crime in the advertising ecosystem' where account recovery can take weeks or months, amplifying damage from manager-account breaches to entire agencies and their clients.
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