Insights into the clustering and reuse of phone numbers in scam emails
Talos has recently started to collect and gather intelligence around phone numbers within emails as an additional indicator of compromise (IOC). In this blog, we discuss new insights into in-the-wild phone number reuse in scam emails.
The n8n n8mare: How threat actors are misusing AI workflow automation
Cisco Talos research has uncovered agentic AI workflow automation platform abuse in emails. Recently, we identified an increase in the number of emails that abuse n8n, one of these platforms, from as early as October 2025 through March 2026.
Too salty to handle: Exposing cases of CSS abuse for hidden text salting
A simple yet effective tactic, known as hidden text salting, is increasingly used by cybercriminals over the past few months to evade even the most advanced email security solutions, including those powered by machine learning and large language models.
PDFs: Portable documents, or perfect deliveries for phish?
A popular social engineering technique returns: callback phishing, or TOAD attacks, which leverage PDFs, VoIP anonymity and even QR code tricks.
Abusing with style: Leveraging cascading style sheets for evasion and tracking
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are ever present in modern day web browsing, however its far from their own use. This blog will detail the ways adversaries use CSS in email campaigns for evasion and tracking.
Seasoning email threats with hidden text salting
Hidden text salting is a simple yet effective technique for bypassing email parsers, confusing spam filters, and evading detection engines that rely on keywords. Cisco Talos has observed an increase in the number of email threats leveraging hidden text salting.
Hidden between the tags: Insights into spammers’ evasion techniques in HTML Smuggling
Talos is releasing a new list of CyberChef recipes that enable faster and easier reversal of encoded JavaScript code contained in the observed HTML attachments.
From trust to trickery: Brand impersonation over the email attack vector
Cisco recently developed and released a new feature to detect brand impersonation in emails when adversaries pretend to be a legitimate corporation.