TLDR Tech / InfoSec
Inside the 2026 SMB threat landscape: From phishing and scams to fake AI tools
Kaspersky's annual SMB threat analysis reports 33,352 attacks between January and April in which malware or PUAs, mostly Trojware capable of pulling additional payloads, masqueraded as five popular AI services, nearly five times the prior year and outpacing fake office tools, with Claude and OpenClaw among the leading lures alongside roughly 415,000 attacks impersonating messengers and 24,000 impersonating office software. The credential-theft chain leans on legitimate-platform abuse, with phishing kits spoofing OneDrive document shares, fake Facebook policy-violation appeals, two-stage lures staged through Zoom Docs pages, and dark web initial-access listings that disproportionately advertise SMBs as soft entry points into larger partners via trusted-relationship attacks, which rose from 12.7 percent of initial vectors in 2024 to 15.5 percent in 2025. Defenders should restrict and promptly revoke access to corporate resources, enforce account and password hygiene with email-borne threat filtering, run phishing-simulation awareness training, and install software only from official sources after verifying platform availability.
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