Phishing Campaign Abuses Legitimate RMM Tools for Remote System Control

A phishing campaign active since January 2026 has targeted victims in 46 countries—45% of observed activity involved the United States—using tax forms, Social Security notices, invoices, VAT, shipping, Adobe PDF, and shared-file lures. Victims are sent to short-lived pages hosted on services including Vercel, Netlify, Amazon S3, and DigitalOcean Spaces, or on compromised sites, then prompted to download password-protected ZIP archives. The archives use a VBS-to-PowerShell chain to retrieve signed installers for legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) products, giving operators interactive access without relying on conventional malware.

The operators rotate among GoTo Resolve, LogMeIn Rescue, ScreenConnect, ConnectWise, and ITarian, limiting the value of product-specific blocking. Researchers identified 425 delivery-kit URLs across 240 hosts between February 5 and July 29, with 94% of hosts remaining live for only one day; stable kit artifacts included fmtt font files, font1.woff2, icons8-microsoft-word-94.png, and a secure.html-to-ZIP delivery chain. Organizations should detect and investigate unauthorized RMM deployments, particularly script-initiated PowerShell downloads of MSI installers, newly installed support software, and password-protected ZIP files delivered through phishing pages.