May 25, 2022

Uncovering the Sysrv-Hello Crypto-Jacking Bonet

Discover the cyber kill chain of a Sysrv-hello botnet infection in France and gain insights into the latest TTPs of the botnet in March and April 2022.

Written by

Shuh Chin Goh

Inside the SOC

Darktrace cyber analysts are world-class experts in threat intelligence, threat hunting and incident response, and provide 24/7 SOC support to thousands of Darktrace customers around the globe. Inside the SOC is exclusively authored by these experts, providing analysis of cyber incidents and threat trends, based on real-world experience in the field.

Written by

Shuh Chin Goh

May 2022

In recent years, the prevalence of crypto-jacking botnets has risen in tandem with the popularity and value of cryptocurrencies. Increasingly crypto-mining malware programs are distributed by botnets as they allow threat actors to harness the cumulative processing power of a large number of machines (discussed in our other Darktrace blogs.^{1 2} One of these botnets is Sysrv-hello, which in addition to crypto-mining, propagates aggressively across the Internet in a worm-like manner by trolling for Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities and SSH worming from the compromised victim devices. This all has the purpose of expanding the botnet.

First identified in December 2020, Sysrv-hello’s operators constantly update and change the bots’ behavior to evolve and stay ahead of security researchers and law enforcement. As such, infected systems can easily go unnoticed by both users and organizations. This blog examines the cyber kill chain sequence of a Sysrv-hello botnet infection detected at the network level by Darktrace DETECT/Network, as well as the botnet’s tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in March and April 2022.

Figure 1: Timeline of the attack

Delivery and exploitation

The organization, which was trialing Darktrace, had deployed the technology on March 2, 2022. On the very same day, the initial host infection was seen through the download of a first-stage PowerShell loader script from a rare external endpoint by a device in the internal network. Although initial exploitation of the device happened prior to the installation and was not observed, this botnet is known to target RCE vulnerabilities in various applications such as MySQL, Tomcat, PHPUnit, Apache Solar, Confluence, Laravel, JBoss, Jira, Sonatype, Oracle WebLogic and Apache Struts to gain initial access to internal systems.³ Recent iterations have also been reported to have been deployed via drive-by-downloads from an empty HTML iframe pointing to a malicious executable that downloads to the device from a user visiting a compromised website.⁴

Initial intrusion

The Sysrv-hello botnet is distributed for both Linux and Windows environments, with the corresponding compatible script pulled based on the architecture of the system. In this incident, the Windows version was observed.

On March 2, 2022 at 15:15:28 UTC, the device made a successful HTTP GET request to a malicious IP address⁵ that had a rarity score of 100% in the network. It subsequently downloaded a malicious PowerShell script named ‘ldr.ps1'⁶ onto the system. The associated IP address ‘194.145.227[.]21’ belongs to ‘ASN AS48693 Rices Privately owned enterprise’ and had been identified as a Sysrv-hello botnet command and control (C2) server in April the previous year. ³

Looking at the URI ‘/ldr.ps1?b0f895_admin:admin_81.255.222.82:8443_https’, it appears some form of query was being executed onto the object. The question mark ‘?’ in this URI is used to delimit the boundary between the URI of the queryable object and the set of strings used to express a query onto that object. Conventionally, we see the set of strings contains a list of key/value pairs with equal signs ‘=’, which are separated by the ampersand symbol ‘&’ between each of those parameters (e.g. www.youtube[.]com/watch?v=RdcCjDS0s6s&ab_channel=SANSCyberDefense), though the exact structure of the query string is not standardized and different servers may parse it differently. Instead, this case saw a set of strings with the hexadecimal color code #b0f895 (a light shade of green), admin username and password login credentials, and the IP address ‘81.255.222[.]82’ being applied during the object query (via HTTPS protocol on port 8443). In recent months this French IP has also had reports of abuse from the OSINT community.⁷

On March 2, 2022 at 15:15:33 UTC, the PowerShell loader script further downloaded second-stage executables named ‘sys.exe’ and ‘xmrig.2 sver.^{8 9} These have been identified as the worm and cryptocurrency miner payloads respectively.

Establish foothold

On March 2, 2022 at 17:46:55 UTC, after the downloads of the worm and cryptocurrency miner payloads, the device initiated multiple SSL connections in a regular, automated manner to Pastebin – a text storage website. This technique was used as a vector to download/upload data and drop further malicious scripts onto the host. OSINT sources suggest the JA3 client SSL fingerprint (05af1f5ca1b87cc9cc9b25185115607d) is associated with PowerShell usage, corroborating with the observation that further tooling was initiated by the PowerShell script ‘ldr.ps1’.

Continual Pastebin C2 connections were still being made by the device almost two months since the initiation of such connections. These Pastebin C2 connections point to new tactics and techniques employed by Sysrv-hello — reports earlier than May do not appear to mention any usage of the file storage site. These new TTPs serve two purposes: defense evasion using a web service/protocol and persistence. Persistence was likely achieved through scheduling daemons downloaded from this web service and shellcode executions at set intervals to kill off other malware processes, as similarly seen in other botnets.¹⁰ Recent reports have seen other malware programs also switch to Pastebin C2 tunnels to deliver subsequent payloads, scrapping the need for traditional C2 servers and evading detection.¹¹

Figure 2: A section of the constant SSL connections that the device was still making to ‘pastebin[.]com’ even in the month of April, which resembles beaconing scheduled activity

Throughout the months of March and April, suspicious SSL connections were made from a second potentially compromised device in the internal network to the infected breach device. The suspicious French IP address ‘81.255.222[.]82’ previously seen in the URI object query was revealed as the value of the Server Name Indicator (SNI) in these SSL connections where, typically, a hostname or domain name is indicated.

After an initial compromise, attackers usually aim to gain long-term remote shell access to continue the attack. As the breach device does not have a public IP address and is most certainly behind a firewall, for it to be directly accessible from the Internet a reverse shell would need to be established. Outgoing connections often succeed because firewalls generally filter only incoming traffic. Darktrace observed the device making continuous outgoing connections to an external host listening on an unusual port, 8443, indicating the presence of a reverse shell for pivoting and remote administration.

Figure 3: SSL connections to server name ‘81.255.222[.]8’ at end of March and start of April

Accomplish mission

On March 4, 2022 at 15:07:04 UTC, the device made a total of 16,029 failed connections to a large volume of external endpoints on the same port (8080). This behavior is consistent with address scanning. From the country codes, it appears that public IP addresses for various countries around the world were contacted (at least 99 unique addresses), with the US being the most targeted.

From 19:44:36 UTC onwards, the device performed cryptocurrency mining using the Minergate mining pool protocol to generate profits for the attacker. A login credential called ‘x’ was observed in the Minergate connections to ‘194.145.227[.]21’ via port 5443. JSON-RPC methods of ‘login’ and ‘submit’ were seen from the connection originator (the infected breach device) and ‘job’ was seen from the connection responder (the C2 server). A high volume of connections using the JSON-RPC application protocol to ‘pool-fr.supportxmr[.]com’ were also made on port 80.

When the botnet was first discovered in December 2020, mining pools MineXMR and F2Pool were used. In February 2021, MineXMR was removed and in March 2021, Nanopool mining pool was added,¹² before switching to the present SupportXMR and Minergate mining pools. Threat actors utilize such proxy pools to help hide the actual crypto wallet address where the contributions are made by the crypto-mining activity. From April onwards, the device appears to download the ‘xmrig.exe’ executable from a rare IP address ‘61.103.177[.]229’ in Korea every few days – likely in an attempt to establish persistency and ensure the cryptocurrency mining payload continues to exist on the compromised system for continued mining.

On March 9, 2022 from 18:16:20 UTC onwards, trolling for various RCE vulnerabilities (including but not limited to these four) was observed over HTTP connections to public IP addresses:

Through March, the device made around 5,417 HTTP POSTs with the URI ‘/vendor/phpunit/phpunit/src/Util/PHP/eval-stdin.php’ to at least 99 unique public IPs. This appears to be related to CVE-2017-9841, which in PHPUnit allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary PHP code via HTTP POST data beginning with a ‘¹³PHPUnit is a common testing framework for PHP, used for performing unit tests during application development. It is used by a variety of popular Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal and Prestashop. This CVE has been called “one of the most exploitable CVEs of 2019,” with around seven million attack attempts being observed that year.¹⁴ This framework is not designed to be exposed on the critical paths serving web pages and should not be reachable by external HTTP requests. Looking at the status messages of the HTTP POSTs in this incident, some ‘Found’ and ‘OK’ messages were seen, suggesting the vulnerable path could be accessible on some of those endpoints.

Figure 4: PCAP of CVE-2017-9841 vulnerability trolling

Figure 5: The CVE-2017-9841 vulnerable path appears to be reachable on some endpoints

Through March, the device also made around 5,500 HTTP POSTs with the URI ‘/_ignition/execute-solution’ to at least 99 unique public IPs. This appears related to CVE-2021-3129, which allows unauthenticated remote attackers to execute arbitrary code using debug mode with Laravel, a PHP web application framework in versions prior to 8.4.2.¹⁵ The POST request below makes the variable ‘username’ optional, and the ‘viewFile’ parameter is empty, as a test to see if the endpoint is vulnerable.¹⁶

Figure 6: PCAP of CVE-2021-3129 vulnerability trolling

The device made approximately a further 252 HTTP GETs with URIs containing ‘invokefunction&function’ to another minimum of 99 unique public IPs. This appears related to a RCE vulnerability in ThinkPHP, an open-source web framework.¹⁷

Figure 7: Some of the URIs associated with ThinkPHP RCE vulnerability

A HTTP header related to a RCE vulnerability for the Jakarta Multipart parser used by Apache struts2 in CVE-2017-5638¹⁸ was also seen during the connection attempts. In this case the payload used a custom Content-Type header.

Figure 8: PCAP of CVE-2017-5638 vulnerability trolling

Two widely used methods of SSH authentication are public key authentication and password authentication. After gaining a foothold in the network, previous reports^{3 19} have mentioned that Sysrv-hello harvests private SSH keys from the compromised device, along with identifying known devices. Being a known device means the system can communicate with the other system without any further authentication checks after the initial key exchange. This technique was likely performed in conjunction with password brute-force attacks against the known devices. Starting from March 9, 2022 at 20:31:25 UTC, Darktrace observed the device making a large number of SSH connections and login failures to public IP ranges. For example, between 00:05:41 UTC on March 26 and 05:00:02 UTC on April 14, around 83,389 SSH connection attempts were made to 31 unique public IPs.

Figure 9: Darktrace’s Threat Visualizer shows large spikes in SSH connections by the breach device

Figure 10: Beaconing SSH connections to a single external endpoint, indicating a potential brute-force attack

Darktrace coverage

Cyber AI Analyst was able to connect the events and present them in a digestible, chronological order for the organization. In the aftermath of any security incidents, this is a convenient way for security users to conduct assisted investigations and reduce the workload on human analysts. However, it is good to note that this activity was also easily observed in real time from the model section on the Threat Visualizer due to the large number of escalating model breaches.

Figure 11: Cyber AI Analyst consolidating the events in the month of March into a summary

Figure 12: Cyber AI Analyst shows the progression of the attack through the month of March

As this incident occurred during a trial, Darktrace RESPOND was enabled in passive mode – with a valid license to display the actions that it would have taken, but with no active control performed. In this instance, no Antigena models breached for the initial compromised device as it was not tagged to be eligible for Antigena actions. Nonetheless, Darktrace was able to provide visibility into these anomalous connections.

Had Antigena been deployed in active mode, and the breach device appropriately tagged with Antigena All or Antigena External Threat, Darktrace would have been able to respond and neutralize different stages of the attack through network inhibitors Block Matching Connections and Enforce Group Pattern of Life, and relevant Antigena models such as Antigena Suspicious File Block, Antigena Suspicious File Pattern of Life Block, Antigena Pastebin Block and Antigena Crypto Currency Mining Block. The first of these inhibitors, Block Matching Connections, will block the specific connection and all future connections that matches the same criteria (e.g. all future outbound HTTP connections from the breach device to destination port 80) for a set period of time. Enforce Group Pattern of Life allows a device to only make connections and data transfers that it or any of its peer group typically make.

Conclusion

Resource hijacking results in unauthorized consumption of system resources and monetary loss for affected organizations. Compromised devices can potentially be rented out to other threat actors and botnet operators could switch from conducting crypto-mining to other more destructive illicit activities (e.g. DDoS or dropping of ransomware) whilst changing their TTPs in the future. Defenders are constantly playing catch-up to this continual evolution, and retrospective rules and signatures solutions or threat intelligence that relies on humans to spot future threats will not be able to keep up.

In this case, it appears the botnet operator has added an object query in the URL of the initial PowerShell loader script download, added Pastebin C2 for evasion and persistence, and utilized new cryptocurrency mining pools. Despite this, Darktrace’s Self-Learning AI was able to identify the threats the moment attackers changed their approach, detecting every step of the attack in the network without relying on known indicators of threat.

Appendix

Darktrace model detections

Anomalous File / Script from Rare Location
Anomalous File / EXE from Rare External Location
Compromise / Agent Beacon (Medium Period)
Compromise / Slow Beaconing Activity To External Rare
Compromise / Beaconing Activity To External Rare
Device / External Address Scan
Compromise / Crypto Currency Mining Activity
Compromise / High Priority Crypto Currency Mining
Compromise / High Volume of Connections with Beacon Score
Compromise / SSL Beaconing to Rare Destination
Anomalous Connection / Multiple HTTP POSTs to Rare Hostname
Device / Large Number of Model Breaches
Anomalous Connection / Multiple Failed Connections to Rare Endpoint
Anomalous Connection / SSH Brute Force
Compromise / SSH Beacon
Compliance / SSH to Rare External AWS
Compromise / High Frequency SSH Beacon
Compliance / SSH to Rare External Destination
Device / Multiple C2 Model Breaches
Anomalous Connection / POST to PHP on New External Host

MITRE ATT&CK techniques observed:

IoCs

Thanks to Victoria Baldie and Yung Ju Chua for their contributions.

Footnotes

1. https://www.darktrace.com/en/blog/crypto-botnets-moving-laterally

2. https://www.darktrace.com/en/blog/how-ai-uncovered-outlaws-secret-crypto-mining-operation

3. https://www.lacework.com/blog/sysrv-hello-expands-infrastructure

4. https://www.riskiq.com/blog/external-threat-management/sysrv-hello-cryptojacking-botnet

5. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/ip-address/194.145.227.21

6. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/c586845daa2aec275453659f287dcb302921321e04cb476b0d98d731d57c4e83?nocache=1

7. https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/81.255.222.82

8. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/586e271b5095068484446ee222a4bb0f885987a0b77e59eb24511f6d4a774c30

9. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/f5bef6ace91110289a2977cfc9f4dbec1e32fecdbe77326e8efe7b353c58e639

10. https://www.ironnet.com/blog/continued-exploitation-of-cve-2021-26084

11. https://www.zdnet.com/article/njrat-trojan-operators-are-now-using-pastebin-as-alternative-to-central-command-server

12. https://blogs.juniper.net/en-us/threat-research/sysrv-botnet-expands-and-gains-persistence

13. https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-9841

14. https://www.imperva.com/blog/the-resurrection-of-phpunit-rce-vulnerability

15. https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2021-3129

16. https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Laravel+v842+exploit+attempts+for+CVE20213129+debug+mode+Remote+code+execution/27758

17. https://securitynews.sonicwall.com/xmlpost/thinkphp-remote-code-execution-rce-bug-is-actively-being-exploited

18. https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-5638

19. https://sysdig.com/blog/crypto-sysrv-hello-wordpress

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Written by

Shuh Chin Goh

Inside the SOC

Written by

Shuh Chin Goh

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

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Email

November 28, 2025

From Amazon to Louis Vuitton: How Darktrace Detects Black Friday Phishing Attacks

Why Black Friday Drives a Surge in Phishing Attacks

In recent years, Black Friday has shifted from a single day of online retail sales and discounts to an extended ‘Black Friday Week’, often preceded by weeks of online hype. During this period, consumers are inundated with promotional emails and marketing campaigns as legitimate retailers compete for attention.

Unsurprisingly, this surge in legitimate communications creates an ideal environment for threat actors to launch targeted phishing campaigns designed to mimic legitimate retail emails. These campaigns often employ social engineering techniques that exploit urgency, exclusivity, and consumer trust in well-known brands, tactics designed to entice recipients into opening emails and clicking on malicious links.

Additionally, given the seasonal nature of Black Friday and the ever-changing habits of consumers, attackers adopt new tactics and register fresh domains each year, rather than reusing domains previously flagged as spam or phishing endpoints. While this may pose a challenge for traditional email security tools, it presents no such difficulty for Darktrace / EMAIL and its anomaly-based approach.

In the days and weeks leading up to ‘Black Friday’, Darktrace observed a spike in sophisticated phishing campaigns targeting consumers, demonstrating how attackers combine phycological manipulation with technical evasion to bypass basic security checks during this high-traffic period. This blog showcases several notable examples of highly convincing phishing emails detected and contained by Darktrace / EMAIL in mid to late November 2025.

Darktrace’s Black Friday Detections

Brand Impersonation: Deal Watchdogs’ Amazon Deals

The impersonation major online retailers has become a common tactic in retail-focused attacks, none more so than Amazon, which ranked as the fourth most impersonated brand in 2024, only behind Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook [1]. Darktrace’s own research found Amazon to be the most mimicked brand, making up 80% of phishing attacks in its analysis of global consumer brands.

When faced with an email that appears to come from a trusted sender like Amazon, recipients are far more likely to engage, increasing the success rate of these phishing campaigns.

In one case observed on November 16, Darktrace detected an email with the subject line “NOW LIVE: Amazon’s Best Early Black Friday Deals on Gadgets Under $60”. The email was sent to a customer by the sender ‘Deal Watchdogs’, in what appeared to be an attempt to masquerade as a legitimate discount-finding platform. No evidence indicated that the company was legitimate. In fact, the threat actor made no attempt to create a convincing name, and the domain appeared to be generated by a domain generation algorithm (DGA), as shown in Figure 2.

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Although the email was sent by ‘Deal Watchdogs’, it attempted to impersonate Amazon by featuring realistic branding, including the Amazon logo and a shade of orange similar to that used by them for the ‘CLICK HERE’ button and headline text.

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Figure 1: The contents of the email observed by Darktrace, featuring authentic-looking Amazon branding.

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Darktrace identified that the email, marked as urgent by the sender, contained a suspicious link to a Google storage endpoint (storage.googleapis[.]com), which had been hidden by the text “CLICK HERE”. If clicked, the link could have led to a credential harvester or served as a delivery vector for a malicious payload hosted on the Google storage platform.

Fortunately, Darktrace immediately identified the suspicious nature of this email and held it before delivery, preventing recipients from ever receiving or interacting with the malicious content.

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Figure 2: Darktrace / EMAIL’s detection of the malicious phishing email sent to a customer.

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Around the same time, Darktrace detected a similar email attempting to spoof Amazon on another customer’s network with the subject line “Our 10 Favorite Deals on Amazon That Started Today”, also sent by ‘Deal Watchdogs,’ suggesting a broader campaign.

Analysis revealed that this email originated from the domain petplatz[.]com, a fake marketing domain previously linked to spam activity according to open-source intelligence (OSINT) [2].

Brand Impersonation: Louis Vuitton

A few days later, on November 20, Darktrace / EMAIL detected a phishing email attempting to impersonate the luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton. At first glance, the email, sent under the name ‘Louis Vuitton’ and titled “[Black Friday 2025] Discover Your New Favorite Louis Vuitton Bag – Elegance Starts Here”, appeared to be a legitimate Black Friday promotion. However, Darktrace’s analysis uncovered several red flags indicating a elaborate brand impersonation attempt.

The email was not sent by Louis Vuitton but by rskkqxyu@bookaaatop[.]ru, a Russia-based domain never before observed on the customer’s network. Darktrace flagged this as suspicious, noting that .ru domains were highly unusual for this recipient’s environment, further reinforcing the likelihood of malicious intent. Subsequent analysis revealed that the domain had only recently registered and was flagged as malicious by multiple OSINT sources [3].

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Figure 3: Darktrace / EMAIL’s detection of the malicious email attempting to spoofLouis Vuitton, originating from a suspicious Russia-based domain.

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Darktrace further noted that the email contained a highly suspicious link hidden behind the text “View Collection” and “Unsubscribe,” ensuring that any interaction, whether visiting the supposed ‘handbag store’ or attempting to opt out of marketing emails, would direct recipients to the same endpoint. The link resolved to xn--80aaae9btead2a[.]xn--p1ai (топааабоок[.]рф), a domain confirmed as malicious by multiple OSINT sources [4]. At the time of analysis, the domain was inaccessible, likely due to takedown efforts or the short-lived nature of the campaign.

Darktrace / EMAIL blocked this email before it reached customer inboxes, preventing recipients from interacting with the malicious content and averting any disruption.

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Figure 4: The suspicious domain linked in the Louis Vuitton phishing email, now defunct.

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Too good to be true?

Aside from spoofing well-known brands, threat actors frequently lure consumers with “too good to be true” luxury offers, a trend Darktrace observed in multiple cases throughout November.

In one instance, Darktrace identified an email with the subject line “[Black Friday 2025] Luxury Watches Starting at $250.” Emails contained a malicious phishing link, hidden behind text like “Rolex Starting from $250”, “Shop Now”, and “Unsubscribe”.

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Figure 5: Example of a phishing email detected by Darktrace, containing malicious links concealed behind seemingly innocuous text.

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Similarly to the Louis Vuitton email campaign described above, this malicious link led to a .ru domain (hxxps://x.wwwtopsalebooks[.]ru/.../d65fg4er[.]html), which had been flagged as malicious by multiple sources [5].

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Figure 6: Darktrace / EMAIL’s detection of a malicious email promoting a fake luxury watch store, which was successfully held from recipient inboxes.

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If accessed, this domain would redirect users to luxy-rox[.]com, a recently created domain (15 days old at the time of writing) that has also been flagged as malicious by OSINT sources [6]. When visited, the redirect domain displayed a convincing storefront advertising high-end watches at heavily discounted prices.

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Figure 7: The fake storefront presented upon visiting the redirectdomain, luxy-rox[.]com.

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Although the true intent of this domain could not be confirmed, it was likely a scam site or a credential-harvesting operation, as users were required to create an account to complete a purchase. As of the time or writing, the domain in no longer accessible .

This email illustrates a layered evasion tactic: attackers employed multiple domains, rapid domain registration, and concealed redirects to bypass detection. By leveraging luxury branding and urgency-driven discounts, the campaign sought to exploit seasonal shopping behaviors and entice victims into clicking.

Staying Protected During Seasonal Retail Scams

The investigation into these Black Friday-themed phishing emails highlights a clear trend: attackers are exploiting seasonal shopping events with highly convincing campaigns. Common tactics observed include brand impersonation (Amazon, Louis Vuitton, luxury watch brands), urgency-driven subject lines, and hidden malicious links often hosted on newly registered domains or cloud services.

These campaigns frequently use redirect chains, short-lived infrastructure, and psychological hooks like exclusivity and luxury appeal to bypass user scepticism and security filters. Organizations should remain vigilant during retail-heavy periods, reinforcing user awareness training, link inspection practices, and anomaly-based detection to mitigate these evolving threats.

Credit to Ryan Traill (Analyst Content Lead) and Owen Finn (Cyber Analyst)

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Appendices

References

1. https://keepnetlabs.com/blog/top-5-most-spoofed-brands-in-2024

2. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/petplatz.com

3. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/bookaaatop.ru

4. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/xn--80aaae9btead2a.xn--p1ai

5. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/e2b868a74531cd779d8f4a0e1e610ec7f4efae7c29d8b8ab32c7a6740d770897?nocache=1

6. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/domain/luxy-rox.com

Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)

IoC – Type – Description + Confidence

petplatz[.]com – Hostname – Spam domain

bookaaatop[.]ru – Hostname – Malicious Domain

xn--80aaae9btead2a[.]xn--p1ai (топааабоок[.]рф) – Hostname - Malicious Domain

hxxps://x.wwwtopsalebooks[.]ru/.../d65fg4er[.]html) – URL – Malicious Domain

luxy-rox[.]com – Hostname - Malicious Domain

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

Tactic – Technique – Sub-Technique

Initial Access - Phishing – (T1566)

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About the author

Ryan Traill

Analyst Content Lead

Blog

Email

November 28, 2025

Phishing attacks surge by 620% in the lead-up to Black Friday

Black Friday deals are rolling in, and so are the phishing scams

As the world gears up for Black Friday and the festive shopping season, inboxes flood with deals and delivery notifications, creating a perfect storm for phishing attackers to strike.

Contributing to the confusion, legitimate brands often rely on similar urgency cues, limited-time offers, and high-volume email campaigns used by scammers, blurring the lines between real deals and malicious lookalikes. While security teams remain extra vigilant during this period, the risk of phishing emails slipping in unnoticed remains high, as does the risk of individuals clicking to take advantage of holiday shopping offers.

Analysis conducted by Darktrace’s global analyst team revealed that phishing attacks taking advantage of Black Friday jumped by 620% in the weeks leading up to the holiday weekend, with the volume of phishing attacks expected to jump a further 20-30% during Black Friday week itself.

First observation: Brand impersonation

Brand impersonation was one of the techniques that stood out, with threat actors creating convincing emails – likely assisted by generative AI – purporting to be from household brands including special offers and promotions.

The week before Thanksgiving (15-21 November) saw 201% more phishing attempts mimicking US retailers than the same week in October, as attackers sought to profit off the back of the busy holiday shopping season. It’s not just about volume, either – attackers are spoofing brands people love to shop with during the holidays. Fake emails that look like they’re from well-known retailers like Macy’s, Walmart, and Target were up by 54% just across last week¹. Even so, Amazon is the most impersonated brand, making up 80% of phishing attempts in Darktrace’s analysis of global consumer brands like Apple, Alibaba and Netflix.

While major brands invest heavily in protecting their organizations and customers from cyber-attacks, impersonation is a complicated area as it falls outside of a brand’s legitimate infrastructure and security remit. Retail brands have a huge attack surface, creating plenty of vectors for impersonation, while fake domains, social profiles, and promotional messages can be created quickly and at scale.

Second observation: Fake marketing domains

One prominent Black Friday phishing campaign observed landing in many inboxes uses fake domains purporting to be from marketing sites, like “Pal.PetPlatz.com” and “Epicbrandmarketing.com”.

These emails tend to operate in one of two ways. Some contain “deals” for luxury items such as Rolex watches or Louis Vuitton handbags, designed to tempt readers into clicking. However, the majority are tied to a made-up brand called Deal Watchdogs, which promotes “can’t-miss” Amazon Black Friday offers – designed to lure readers into acting fast to secure legitimate time-sensitive deals. Any user who clicks a link is taken to a fake Amazon website where they are tricked into inputting sensitive data and payment details.

Third observation: The impact of generative AI

The biggest shift seen in phishing in recent years is how much more convincing scam emails are thanks to generative AI. 27% of phishing emails observed by Darktrace in 2024 contained over 1,000 characters², suggesting LLM use in their creation. Tools like ChatGPT and Gemini lower the barrier to entry for cyber-criminals, allowing them to create phishing campaigns that humans find it difficult to spot.

Let’s take a look at a dummy email created by a member of our team without a technical background to illustrate how easy it is to spin up an email that looks and feels like a genuine Black Friday offer. With two prompts, generative AI created a convincing “sale” email that could easily pass as the real thing without requiring any technical skill.

A fake Black Friday deal email created using generative AI, with only two prompts. The image has been pixelated for marketing purposes.

Anyone can now create convincing brand spoofs, and they can do it at scale. That makes it even more important for email users to pause, check the sender, and think before they click.

Why phishing scams hurt consumers and brands

These spoofs don’t just drain shoppers’ bank accounts and grab their personal data. They erode trust, drive people away from real sites, and ultimately hurt brands’ sales. And the fakes keep getting sharper, more convincing, and harder to spot.

Though brands should implement email controls like DMARC to help reduce spoofing, they can’t stop attackers from registering new look-alike domains or using other channels. At the end of the day, human users remain vulnerable to well-crafted scams, particularly when the element of trust from a well-known brand is involved. And while brands can’t prevent all impersonation scams, the fallout can still erode consumer trust and damage their reputation.

In order to limit the impact of these scams, two things need to work together: better education so consumers know when to slow down and look twice, and email security (plus a DMARC solution and an attack surface management tool) that can adapt faster than the attackers – protecting both shoppers and the brands they love.

Tips to stay safe while Black Friday shopping online

On top of retailers implementing robust email security, there are some simple steps shoppers can take to stay safer while shopping this holiday season.

Check every website (twice). Scammers make tiny changes you can barely see. They’ll switch Walmart.com for Waimart.com and most people won’t notice. If something looks even slightly off, check the URL carefully and, if you’re unsure, search for reviews of that exact address.
Santa keeps the real gifts in the workshop. Don’t just click through from sales emails. Use them as a prompt to log in directly to the official app or site, where any genuine notifications will appear.
Look at the payment options. Real retailers usually offer a handful of recognizable ways to pay; if a site pushes only odd methods or upfront transfers, don’t use it.
Be skeptical of Christmas miracles. If a deal on a big-ticket item looks too good to be true, it usually is.
Leave the rushing to the elves. Countdown timers and “last chance” banners are designed to make you click before you think. Take a breath, double-check the sender and the site, and then decide whether to buy.

Email security you can trust this holiday season

The heightened holiday shopping season shines a spotlight on an uncomfortable reality: now that phishing emails are harder than ever to distinguish from legitimate brand communication, traditional spam filters and Secure Email Gateways struggle to keep up. In order to protect against communication-based attacks, organizations require email security that can evaluate the full context of an email – not just surface-level indicators – and stop malicious messages before they reach inboxes.

Darktrace / EMAIL uses Self-Learning AI to understand the behavior and patterns of every user, so it can detect the subtle inconsistencies that reveal a message isn’t genuine, from shifts in tone and writing style to unexpected links, unfamiliar senders, or off-brand visual cues. By identifying these anomalies automatically – and either holding them entirely, or neutralizing malicious elements – it removes the burden from employees to catch near-imperceptible errors and reinforces protection for the entire organization, from staff to customers to brand reputation.

Join our live broadcast on 9 December, where Darktrace will reveal new, industry-first innovations in email security keeping organizations safe this Christmas – from DMARC to DLP. Sign up to the live launch event now.

For a deeper dive into some specific Black Friday phishing campaigns surfaced by the Darktrace threat analysis team, read the follow-up blog here.

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A note on methodology

Insights derive from anonymous live data across 6,500 customers protected by Darktrace / EMAIL. Darktrace created models tracking verified phishing emails that:

Explicitly mentioned Black Friday
Impersonated US retailers popular during the holiday season (Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Macy's, Old Navy, 1800-Flowers)
Impersonated major global brands (Apple, eBay, Netflix, Alibaba and PayPal)

Tracking ran from October 1 to November 21.

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References

[1] Based on live tracking of phishing emails spoofing Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Macy's, Old Navy, 1800-Flowers across email inboxes protected by Darktrace.  November 15 – November 21, 2025

[2] Based on analysis of 30.4 million phishing emails between December 21, 2023, and December 18, 2024. Darktrace Annual Threat Report 2024.

[related-resource]

About the author

Carlos Gray

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Email

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Delivery and exploitation

Initial intrusion

Establish foothold

Accomplish mission

Darktrace coverage

Conclusion

Appendix

Darktrace model detections

MITRE ATT&CK techniques observed:

IoCs

Footnotes

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Email

November 28, 2025

Phishing attacks surge by 620% in the lead-up to Black Friday

Black Friday deals are rolling in, and so are the phishing scams

First observation: Brand impersonation

Second observation: Fake marketing domains

Third observation: The impact of generative AI

Why phishing scams hurt consumers and brands

Tips to stay safe while Black Friday shopping online

Email security you can trust this holiday season

A note on methodology

References