Over 500 Organizations Hit in Years-Long Phishing Campaign

A phishing campaign that has been ongoing for more than four years has made hundreds of victims across multiple industries, SOCRadar reports. Dubbed Operation HookedWing, the campaign was first documented in 2022 but has sustained activity and adapted its infrastructure while keeping core patterns largely unchanged. Over the course of four years, more than 2,000 user credentials across over 500 organizations in the aviation and travel, critical infrastructure, energy, financial, government, logistics, public administration, and technology sectors were stolen as part of the campaign. Between 2022 and 2024, Operation HookedWing used GitHub domains with English content and compromised servers as infrastructure, and the attacks mainly featured Microsoft and Outlook themes. In 2024 and 2025, the threat actor expanded its targeting with French content, continuing to use GitHub, compromised servers, and previously observed phishing themes. Starting in 2025, the threat actor has expanded both the active infrastructure and lures, obfuscating GitHub domain naming, adding more themes, and deploying additional landing pages. SOCRadar identified two dozen command-and-control (C&C) servers associated with Operation HookedWing, as well as over 100 GitHub domains, and over a dozen distribution domains on other platforms. “Analysis of recovered logs and identified infrastructure reveals a targeting pattern that is not random, as it focuses on infrastructure of high geopolitical relevance,” SOCRadar says. “Victim selection suggests a particular interest in environments with access to sensitive information, critical operations, or high-privilege credentials that can be sold or used by other adversaries,” the company adds. Operation HookedWing relies on phishing emails impersonating human resources or colleagues, or posing as notifications. The messages have a simple structure and are designed to convey authority and urgency without raising suspicion. Many of the emails contain links to GitHub repositories, with some of them pointing to intermediaries hosted on other platforms. The landing pages simulate Microsoft Outlook behavior through a full-screen pre-loader and personalize the displayed text based on the victim organization. “This introduces an important behavioral element. If the victim watches the loading screen, seeing their own organization name or something related to the previous email reinforces the credibility of the environment before the form appears,” SOCRadar notes. In the meantime, a background script performs email and URL validation, injects a PHP form with pre-filled fields to collect the victims’ credentials, and retrieves geolocation data about the victim. When the victim clicks the sign-in button on the page, the attacker “receives, in a single record, the email, password, IP address, full geolocation, source URL, and the victim organization domain”, SOCRadar explains. Related: Microsoft Warns of Sophisticated Phishing Campaign Targeting US Organizations Related: New Bluekit Phishing Kit Features AI Assistant Related: Tycoon 2FA Loses Phishing Kit Crown Amid Surge in Attacks Related: Security Firm Executive Targeted in Sophisticated Phishing Attack WRITTEN BY Ionut Arghire Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek. 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