A phishing campaign is using AI-themed lures to target employees who operate advertising accounts, according to a new report from Island. The campaign is launched from a phishing platform that poses as a portfolio of AI advertising tools, using branding from Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Muse. The platform’s operator added a fake Muse Ads lure eight days after Meta launched its Muse AI agent.
“Every brand gets its own pitch,” the researchers write. “ChatGPT promises a Monday Google Ads brief. Gemini promises MCC (manager account) and linked-client support. Claude gets its own advertising portal, Perplexity offers campaign planning and spend audits, and Manus offers a private Meta integration. The copy is written in advertiser shorthand like MCC and ROAS, so a request to connect an account feels routine.”
The phishing pages are designed to harvest passwords and intercept multifactor authentication codes in order to grant attackers access to victims’ accounts.
“Each product was built around the same action: ‘Connect,’” the researchers write. “Clicking it opened a browser drawn inside the real browser. The fake address bar displayed trusted origins such as accounts.google.com or an Okta tenant, while the real browser remained on the phishing domain. Behind the interface, the platform kept every password attempt, fingerprinted the device, and let an operator pick which MFA challenge the victim saw next.”
Island notes that ad accounts are particularly valuable to attackers because they provide opportunities to launch downstream attacks against the victim’s clients and customers.
“The lures are written for agency staff, media buyers, and manager-account administrators, because an advertising account is a spending account,” the researchers write. “It carries a stored payment method and an approved budget, and a manager account can reach several client accounts, each with its own billing profile and linked users....For the victim, the card is the easy part: they can remove it within hours. Getting the account back is not. Attackers typically add their own administrators and downgrade the legitimate owner, and recovery can take weeks or months while the account keeps serving ads. For a manager account, the damage reaches the agency’s clients.”
Island has the story: https://www.island.io/blog/behind-the-connect-button-the-fake-ai-ads-campaign
