Today’s Topics:

• ClickFix Phishing Wave Hits Hotels and Hijacks Booking Accounts With PureRAT
• Microsoft Warns of Whisper Leak: Encrypted AI Chat Traffic Can Reveal User Topics
• How can Netizen help?

ClickFix Phishing Wave Hits Hotels and Hijacks Booking Accounts With PureRAT

Large-scale phishing activity is hitting the hospitality sector again, and researchers say the latest wave is using convincing ClickFix-style pages to push PureRAT onto hotel systems. The operation has been active since spring 2025 and appears to have accelerated through early fall, with attackers focusing on hotel managers who maintain Booking.com, Expedia, and other reservation platforms.

The attack starts with email accounts that have already been compromised. From there, hotel staff receive messages that look like legitimate booking updates or verification prompts. When they click through, they’re sent to a fake verification page that imitates a reCAPTCHA step. That page then urges them to run a copied command on their computer. Once executed, the command retrieves a ZIP archive containing a binary that uses DLL side-loading to load PureRAT.

PureRAT gives the attacker broad control. It can log keystrokes, capture webcam and microphone feeds, move files in and out, proxy traffic, run commands, and maintain persistent access through a Run registry key. The malware is packed with protections that complicate reverse engineering, making analysis slower and giving the operators more time with a compromised system.

Once threat actors gain access to hotel extranet accounts, they use or sell the stolen credentials. These accounts are valuable because they allow direct contact with guests. Attackers send messages over email or WhatsApp containing accurate reservation information, then guide customers to fake landing pages that imitate Booking.com or Expedia. The goal is to collect card details under the false pretext of preventing cancellations or verifying payment.

Behind the scenes, the scheme relies heavily on underground marketplaces. Criminal groups buy and sell Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, and Agoda logs, often bundled as username-password pairs or session cookies harvested from infostealer infections. Log-checker tools and Telegram bots make it easy for buyers to validate that the stolen accounts still work, which keeps the cycle running smoothly.

The sophistication of the ClickFix technique continues to grow. Newer versions of the phishing page display a short countdown timer, a fake verification counter, and even embedded videos to make the prompt feel routine and harmless. The page adapts to the victim’s operating system, giving system-specific instructions and automatically copying the malicious command to the clipboard to reduce friction.

This is part of a broader trend: fraud groups are building repeatable, service-based workflows around these attacks. Compromise leads to credential harvesting, which leads to guest-targeting scams, all supported by cheap tools, malware distributors, and credential brokers. As these pages become more convincing, hotel staff and customers become easier targets.

Microsoft Warns of Whisper Leak: Encrypted AI Chat Traffic Can Reveal User Topics

Microsoft is warning about a new privacy threat called Whisper Leak, a side-channel technique that allows someone watching encrypted traffic to guess what topics a user is discussing with an AI chatbot. Even though the traffic is protected with TLS, packet sizes and timing patterns still reveal enough structure for an attacker with the right access to narrow down conversation themes.

According to Microsoft’s researchers, an attacker positioned at an ISP, on a shared network, or on the same Wi-Fi could collect encrypted packets, analyze their sequence, and use machine learning models to classify whether the user’s prompt matches a topic of interest. This works because streaming models send data incrementally, and those streams often reflect token boundaries and response pacing in ways that can be measured even without decrypting the content.

Microsoft’s tests used LightGBM, Bi-LSTM, and BERT classifiers to determine whether a prompt belonged to a specific target category. Several prominent models from major vendors were found to be vulnerable, with classification rates above 98 percent in many cases. Google and Amazon models showed more resistance, likely due to their token batching methods, though they were not completely unaffected.

This raises clear concerns. If a surveillance actor collected enough traffic over time, they could reliably flag users asking about sensitive subjects, whether political, financial, or otherwise monitored. The technique also becomes stronger as the attacker gathers more samples to train on, making long-term monitoring more effective than one-off observations.

Vendors have started deploying mitigations. The most effective countermeasure adds a random, variable-length text segment to each streamed output, which disrupts the relationship between token size and packet size. Microsoft, OpenAI, Mistral, and xAI have already incorporated these defenses.

In the meantime, users who are concerned about privacy are advised to avoid discussing sensitive topics on insecure networks, use VPNs, or rely on non-streaming model modes. Choosing providers that have implemented Whisper Leak countermeasures can also limit exposure.

This disclosure arrives alongside another study showing that many open-weight models remain vulnerable to multi-turn adversarial prompts. Researchers found that safety degradation becomes more pronounced across longer conversations, especially in models designed primarily for capability instead of safety. These findings reinforce that organizations deploying open-source or lightly-aligned models still face meaningful risks unless they apply additional security controls, perform regular red-team testing, and maintain strict system-prompt guidance.

How Can Netizen Help?

Founded in 2013, Netizen is an award-winning technology firm that develops and leverages cutting-edge solutions to create a more secure, integrated, and automated digital environment for government, defense, and commercial clients worldwide. Our innovative solutions transform complex cybersecurity and technology challenges into strategic advantages by delivering mission-critical capabilities that safeguard and optimize clients’ digital infrastructure. One example of this is our popular “CISO-as-a-Service” offering that enables organizations of any size to access executive level cybersecurity expertise at a fraction of the cost of hiring internally. 

Netizen also operates a state-of-the-art 24x7x365 Security Operations Center (SOC) that delivers comprehensive cybersecurity monitoring solutions for defense, government, and commercial clients. Our service portfolio includes cybersecurity assessments and advisory, hosted SIEM and EDR/XDR solutions, software assurance, penetration testing, cybersecurity engineering, and compliance audit support. We specialize in serving organizations that operate within some of the world’s most highly sensitive and tightly regulated environments where unwavering security, strict compliance, technical excellence, and operational maturity are non-negotiable requirements. Our proven track record in these domains positions us as the premier trusted partner for organizations where technology reliability and security cannot be compromised.

Netizen holds ISO 27001, ISO 9001, ISO 20000-1, and CMMI Level III SVC registrations demonstrating the maturity of our operations. We are a proud Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) certified by U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) that has been named multiple times to the Inc. 5000 and Vet 100 lists of the most successful and fastest-growing private companies in the nation. Netizen has also been named a national “Best Workplace” by Inc. Magazine, a multiple awardee of the U.S. Department of Labor HIRE Vets Platinum Medallion for veteran hiring and retention, the Lehigh Valley Business of the Year and Veteran-Owned Business of the Year, and the recipient of dozens of other awards and accolades for innovation, community support, working environment, and growth.

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