{"id":230226,"date":"2026-04-01T08:36:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T12:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/01\/casbaneiro-phishing-targets-latin-america-and-europe-using-dynamic-pdf-lures\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T23:50:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T03:50:12","slug":"casbaneiro-phishing-targets-latin-america-and-europe-using-dynamic-pdf-lures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/01\/casbaneiro-phishing-targets-latin-america-and-europe-using-dynamic-pdf-lures\/","title":{"rendered":"Casbaneiro Phishing Targets Latin America and Europe Using Dynamic PDF Lures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/04\/casbaneiro-phishing-targets-latin.html\">Casbaneiro Phishing Targets Latin America and Europe Using Dynamic PDF Lures<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/04\/casbaneiro-phishing-targets-latin.html\">https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/04\/casbaneiro-phishing-targets-latin.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-04-01 08:36:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"thehackernews.com\">thehackernews.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"p-author\">\ue804<span class=\"author\">Ravie Lakshmanan<\/span>\ue802<span class=\"author\">Apr 01, 2026<\/span><\/span><span class=\"p-tags\">Malware \/ Windows Security<\/span><\/p>\n<p>A multi-pronged phishing campaign is targeting Spanish-speaking users in organizations across Latin America and Europe to deliver Windows banking trojans like Casbaneiro (aka Metamorfo) via another malware called Horabot.<\/p>\n<p>The activity has been attributed to a Brazilian cybercrime threat actor tracked as Augmented Marauder and Water Saci. The e-crime group was first documented by Trend Micro in October 2025.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This threat group employs a wider-ranging attack model focused on a bespoke delivery and propagation mechanism that includes WhatsApp, ClickFix techniques, and email-centric phishing,&#8221; BlueVoyant security researchers Thomas Elkins and Joshua Green said in a technical breakdown published Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It is now evident that while these Brazil-based operators heavily leverage script-based WhatsApp automation to compromise retail and consumer users in Latin America, they concurrently maintain and deploy an advanced, email-hijacking engine to penetrate enterprise perimeters there and Europe as well.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The starting point of the campaign is a phishing email that employs court summons-themed messages to deceive recipients into opening a password-protected PDF attachment. Clicking on an embedded link in the document directs the victim to a malicious link and initiates an automatic download of a ZIP archive, which, in turn, leads to the execution of interim HTML Application (HTA) and VBS payloads.<\/p>\n<p>The VBS script is designed to carry out environment and anti-analysis checks similar to those found in Horabot artifacts, including checks for Avast antivirus software, and proceeds to retrieve next-stage payloads from a remote server. Among the downloaded files are AutoIt-based loaders, each of which extracts and runs encrypted payload files with &#8220;.ia&#8221; or &#8220;.at&#8221; extensions to eventually launch two malware families: Casbaneiro (&#8220;staticdata.dll&#8221;) and Horabot (&#8220;at.dll&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>While Casbaneiro is the primary payload,&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/04\/casbaneiro-phishing-targets-latin.html\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Casbaneiro Phishing Targets Latin America and Europe Using Dynamic PDF Lures https:\/\/thehackernews.com\/2026\/04\/casbaneiro-phishing-targets-latin.html Publish Date: 2026-04-01&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":230227,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/img\/b\/R29vZ2xl\/AVvXsEjpJd0tgZX0EzqjxkNOrJsyGRUV4N21qsJC30j2VYYargUXl2tPz_BidXWWmAG9Wfb5f683WOOle2CElerewagtzAAI8sbcJ9XrCbtgcSRtWF-itSYXH4hbTKvOIrjW9PKSgqi00rOrFCHRWzkWaWmP0qPH0vjrJ2LbbcXgl9aQv3n3tzcT45pdSPMcP54S\/s1600\/pdf-malware.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[32,25,34],"class_list":["post-230226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-malware","tag-phishing","tag-threat-actor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230226"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":230228,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230226\/revisions\/230228"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}