Two RMMs walk into a phish… [Research Saturday]

Alex Berninger, Senior Manager of Intelligence at Red Canary, and Mike Wylie, Director, Threat Hunting at Zscaler, join to discuss four phishing lures in campaigns dropping RMM tools. Red Canary and Zscaler uncovered phishing campaigns delivering legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools—like ITarian, PDQ, SimpleHelp, and Atera—to gain stealthy access to victim systems. Attackers used four main lures (fake browser updates, meeting invites, party invitations, and fake government forms) and often deployed multiple RMM tools in quick succession to establish persistent access and deliver additional malware. The report highlights detection opportunities, provides indicators of compromise, and stresses the importance of monitoring authorized RMM usage, scrutinizing trusted services like Cloudflare R2, and enforcing strict network and endpoint controls. The research can be found here: You’re invited: Four phishing lures in campaigns dropping RMM tools