Iranian APT Launches AI-Assisted Spear Phishing Attacks

DarkAtlas reports that Iran-linked APT42 is using generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini) to enhance spear-phishing against U.S. organizations, improving multilingual conversational social engineering and sustaining believable personas across messages and channels; the group (TAMECAT / SpearSpecter) has also evolved its delivery, persistence, and recovery options and may deploy more resilient malware. Researchers advise monitoring red flags such as transitions from trusted platforms to unrelated domains, sender address mismatches, absence of official event listings, and unexpected channel shifts.