How Phishing-as-a-Service Threats Target FinServ Companies

Sarah, a senior relationship manager at a major bank, opened what looked like a routine IT security bulletin. Everything about the email looked right—corporate branding, familiar formatting, and the standard legal disclaimer. As instructed, she clicked the link and entered her credentials. Within hours, bad actors had drained customer accounts of tens of thousands of dollars.

Attacks like these happen daily across FinServ institutions worldwide, costing firms on average around $6.1 million. They’re increasingly powered by a new business model that makes life easier for online criminals: Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS).

PhaaS is the gig economy meets organized crime. Just as ride-sharing apps democratized transportation, PhaaS platforms have democratized sophisticated cyberattacks, putting crimes that once called for advanced expertise within easy reach of anyone, no coding skills required. 

With technology making it ever easier to unleash successful phishing attacks, Deloitte predicts that fraud losses to U.S. banks and their customers will more than triple from $12.3 billion in 2023 to reach $40 billion by 2027. 

So, how does Phishing-as-a-Service in FinServ work, and what are the best ways to protect your business?

The Commoditization of Cybercrime: What is Phishing-as-a-Service?

Phishing-as-a-Service platforms like Robin Banks, Tycoon 2FA, and LabHost transform cybercrime into a subscription business, allowing anyone to rent professional-grade attack tools, easily steal credentials, and take over accounts for less than a Netflix membership.

A basic Phishing-as-a-Service kit might cost $15 monthly, while those aimed at finance and payment platforms often command prices ten times higher than for generic targets. But bad actors can pay even more to guarantee a higher level of success.

For example, in Europe, Initial Access Brokers sell verified access to financial institutions for an average of $3,700, pocket change compared to the potential returns on a single compromised treasury account that can yield millions. 

The Phishing-as-a-Service platforms themselves provide user-friendly interfaces, automated infrastructure that creates attack domains, and mechanisms to evade detection like reCAPTCHA and user agent checking. Some operators offer "letters", pre-written email templates that pass spam filters, sold separately or bundled with kits. 

Other platforms include Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) capabilities that intercept multi-factor authentication (MFA) tokens in real-time and defeating security measures in milliseconds. 

They’re flexible too, threat actors can purchase access for specific timeframes or to target particular institutions. Some specialize solely in serving region-specific financial institutions, offering templates that reflect local banking communications and disclaimers.

Perhaps, the most concerning development is the increasing professionalization of PhaaS providers, offering comprehensive packages that would make legitimate SaaS companies envious. 

Believe it or not, many cybercrime platforms offer service level agreements, tiered pricing models, and technical support when campaigns encounter issues. Caffeine was a pioneer in such features, providing advanced customer service dashboards for campaign management and optimization. Some offer "freemium" models where beginners can start with basic free phishing templates, then upgrade to advanced features like JavaScript obfuscation and Cloudflare Turnstile integration to evade security crawlers.

To acquire customers, Phishing-as-a-Service operators advertise their services on Telegram channels and  dark web forums. On Telegram for instance, the ONNX store offers cybercriminals access to the Microsoft 365 credentials of FinServ companies, complete with automated 2FA bypass techniques. 

The PhaaS business model goes some way to explaining why the number of attacks keeps escalating. PhaaS platforms profit from volume, not individual outcomes and whether attacks succeed or fail, subscription fees keep flowing. This leads to a numbers game where thousands of amateur criminals launch millions of attacks, knowing just a tiny success rate generates profit. For the platform operators, it's pure revenue with zero downsides because their customers shoulder all the legal risks.

This PhaaS economy isn’t just about upfront theft, every set of stolen credentials becomes a potential entry-point for ransomware operators hunting for network access. 

A PhaaS operator might steal employee credentials via a sophisticated phishing campaign. Within hours, these credentials are sold to an Initial Access Broker (IAB) through a dark web marketplace. The IAB then auctions it to the highest bidder, which may well be a ransomware collective that can leverage that single entry point to encrypt entire networks, paralyze a multinational organization, and demand millions in ransom. With 5,414 reported ransomware attacks in 2024, the pipeline from PhaaS to ransomware attacks poses an existential threat to any FinServ company.

The Digital Transformation Dilemma: Why Financial Services Are Prime PhaaS Targets

FinServ customers now manage entire portfolios from smartphones, appoint investment advisors to conduct million-dollar deals over encrypted messaging, and expect customer service teams to resolve issues across social platforms. But this intersection of trust, value, and complexity makes financial services irresistible to Phishing-as-a-Service operators and for every new digital convenience created, a new attack vector opens up.

FinServ companies face a fundamentally lopsided fight. While their security teams must comply with ever-stricter regulations and ensure a smooth customer experience, they also have to protect thousands of accounts across every possible attack vector from email and SMS to social media and voice calls. Meanwhile, threat actors break the law, exploit psychology, and only need to pick the lock on one account to start seeing profits. The ease-of-use enabled by PhaaS platforms tilts this balance still further in favor of attackers.

Unfortunately, while the underground economy surrounding Phishing-as-a-Service in FinServ matures into a multi-billion dollar industry, companies continue to spend millions on security tools that solve yesterday's problems but leave PhaaS attack vectors wide open.

Inside the Threat Actor's Playbook: Common Phishing-as-a-Service Attack Methods

Modern Phishing-as-a-Service in FinServ campaigns follow sophisticated playbooks refined over thousands of successful breaches. Here’s a summary of the most common techniques they use:

Open Source Reconnaissance

Weeks before the first email lands, the threat actors start with surveillance. For example, their tools will scrape LinkedIn for employee names and titles, and watching out for opportunities to capitalize on, such as new hires in finance departments. They also monitor calendars for things like earnings announcements, system upgrades, or regulatory deadlines, knowing that employees may be more likely to rush through tasks and miss warning signs during more hectic periods.

Social Engineering

Even the most conscientious employees face cognitive overload as they process hundreds of emails daily, juggle multiple communication platforms, and work under constant deadline pressure. These human frailties are why cyber criminals use social engineering in 98% of cyberattacks. 

According to Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) research, 8 out of 10 organizations had at least one employee fooled by a phishing attempt, and 84% of workers who receive phishing emails engage with them within ten minutes, but only 13% report suspicious messages to security teams. The result is billions of exposed accounts.

GenAI

Threat actors then feed the information gleaned from their reconnaissance into Generative AI tools to help them carry out attacks. For example, where tell-tale indicators such as poor spelling or broken English once flagged up scams, AI now drafts region-specific messages with perfect grammar, appropriate financial terminology, and culturally appropriate references. Data from surveillance and breaches also allows these tools to hyper-personalize messages so they seem even more authentic. Such techniques transform phishing email campaigns from the traditional mass spray-and-pray attempts into surgical strikes.

Phishing-as-a-Service platforms also incorporate AI tools that analyze which particular approaches work best — e.g., checking if account suspension warnings generate more clicks than reward offers, if messages see higher engagement on Sunday evening or Monday morning, or if emails from "IT Support" outperform those sent by "Security Team".

Vishing

While email remains a popular delivery mechanism, PhaaS operators increasingly combine channels, for instance building credibility by following up emails with calls that reference "the email we just sent", exploiting the trust people still place in telephone conversations. 

These voice phishing calls, or vishing, can involve elaborate techniques, with attackers spoofing bank telephone numbers and using AI-generated voices performing scripts refined across thousands of calls.

SMS

SMS phishing campaigns, aka smishing, take advantage of the urgent nature of text messages, especially for time-sensitive fraud alerts that can induce panic and encourage victims to reveal personal information. 

Quishing

A growing threat is QR code phishing, or "quishing," where hackers embed malicious QR codes in trusted documents to steal credentials, especially targeting mobile users. This tactic exploits weaker mobile security and bypasses email scanners. The widespread use of QR codes for banking enhances the risk of successful attacks on financial institutions. 

SEO Poisoning

This involves corrupting the search results FinServ customers and staff rely on every day. Attackers compromise legitimate financial websites or create convincing replicas with familiar names that rank highly for terms like "wire transfer forms," "regulatory compliance templates," or "KYC verification procedures." When people visit these resources, they land on attacker-controlled sites that either harvest credentials directly or download malware disguised as helpful tools. 

Adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM)

Multifactor authentication (MFA) was introduced to counter password theft, but modern PhaaS kits defeat this with real-time Adversary-in-the-Middle (AitM). 

When a victim enters their username and password, a phishing site instantly relays these credentials to the legitimate bank portal. As the real site responds with an MFA code, the phishing site captures and uses it before the victim even realizes they've been compromised. This happens in milliseconds, defeating security measures that many institutions consider bulletproof.

OAuth Abuse

Real-time interception is just one technique in the PhaaS bypass arsenal. OAuth abuse exploits the convenience of "Sign in with Google" or "Login with Microsoft" features. Attackers create legitimate-looking applications that request excessive permissions, then use these authorized connections to access financial accounts without ever needing passwords. 

MFA Fatigue

A cruder approach involves bombarding victims with dozens of authentication requests until they approve one by accident or tap “ok” just to stop the notifications, and one moment of frustration becomes a permanent breach.

SIM Swapping

Attackers convince mobile carriers to transfer a victim's phone number to a new device. Once they control the phone number, they intercept all SMS-based authentication codes. In sophisticated SIM swap attacks, criminals research targets for months, gathering enough personal information to convincingly impersonate them to phone company representatives.

Whatever attack vector is used, each successful breach becomes training data for the next attack, and PhaaS operators quickly learn from each other what works, creating an evolutionary pressure that makes campaigns increasingly sophisticated. 

Even if a security team identifies and blocks the activities of one phishing kit, other variants are soon in circulation. Phishing-as-a-Service developers often push updates within hours of detection, faster than most enterprises can deploy patches.

Breaking Free from Reactive Security: Your PhaaS Defense Implementation Roadmap

Phishing-as-a-Service platforms will keep hunting for new ways to steal from FinServ companies, but outdated security models can't handle these modern attacks.

Here’s a breakdown of the steps you need to take to secure your assets, safeguard your customers, and preserve your reputation:

1. Assessment

Most financial institutions underestimate their external attack surface by as much as 30%, unaware of fraudulent domains, social media accounts, and mobile apps impersonating their brand.

Start by identifying every external asset that could be spoofed or compromised. This includes domain variations, social media presences, executive profiles, and mobile app stores, don’t forget to also pay attention to the assets of third-party vendors. 

2. Detection

Implement continuous monitoring across surface, deep, and dark web sources to catch threats forming outside your perimeter and prevent them from reaching customers or employees. This should include enhanced subdomain coverage that catches variations that hide behind legitimate services and SSL certificate monitoring to ensure attackers can't exploit customer trust in the padlock icon. 

3. Integration

You need to move beyond point solutions to adopt integrated defense strategies. While security tools working in isolation may catch incidents in progress, those same tools working together can prevent them from starting. For example, connect external threat intelligence to internal security operations, so teams receive actionable alerts, not just data feeds.

4. Expert Analysis

Human-powered threat intelligence can understand the nuanced context that fits individual incidents into larger attack patterns, helping you better identify Phishing-as-a-Service campaigns before they launch.

5. Response

Human analysts have their strengths, but, when it comes to remediation, automated systems respond faster than manual methods ever could. When monitoring identifies a threat, takedown procedures should be initiated immediately through established industry partnerships with bodies like registrars, ISPs, and platforms. 

6. Delegation

The best PhaaS fighters recognize that external cybersecurity requires powerful tools, vast amounts of intelligence, and specialized expertise. So they maintain dedicated teams or establish partnerships with experts like ZeroFox who have the resources and know-how to find and block every spoofed domain, impersonator account, and fraudulent app abusing their brand. 

ZeroFox: Your Integrated Anti-PhaaS Defense Program

ZeroFox knows that, instead of hoping attacks never reach or breach your network, the best defense involves a proactive strategy that takes the fight outside your perimeter, to the spaces where criminals plan, build, and launch their campaigns.

ZeroFox succeeds using several key elements working together:

• Attack Surface Discovery & External Attack Surface Management

ZeroFox can uncover your true attack surface within hours, often identifying dozens or even hundreds of active threats that traditional security measures miss entirely. This includes dormant domains registered months ago waiting for activation, executive impersonations on emerging social platforms, and even fraudulent mobile apps in international app stores.

• External Threat Intelligence

External threat intelligence lets you spot attacks as they start to take shape. ZeroFox uses a dual approach:

• AI-Powered Detection Technologies

ZeroFox leverages powerful AI-enabled technologies including Natural Language Processing (NLP), OCR, and image comparison for fast and comprehensive anti-phishing protection. The platform ingests customer web logs to discover cloaked phishing websites and employs counter-cloaking tactics like IP block lists, geolocation targeting, and mobile-only targeting to defeat sophisticated PhaaS kits that try to hide from security scanners.

The AI monitors over 100 million data sources every day, analyzing patterns across surface, deep, and dark web sources to identify campaigns in their planning stages, often catching PhaaS kit advertisements before they're fully deployed. Features like enhanced subdomain monitoring even catch sophisticated variations like 'secure-login.yourbank.fake.com' that slip past traditional monitoring, while SSL certificate monitoring alerts teams when attackers provision certificates for lookalike domains.

• Human Experts

With 100+ threat analysts speaking 27 languages, ZeroFox's human intelligence team provides round-the-clock analysis of emerging PhaaS campaigns, enriching automated alerts with human expertise to understand the subtle clues that signal individual incidents are part of larger attack patterns.

• Automated Remediation Capabilities

While knowing that a phishing threat is targeting your institution is valuable, intelligence alone isn't enough. The average phishing domain stays active for only 54 hours, but causes damage within minutes, and by the time traditional incident response kicks in, the damage is already done. Automated disruption is essential to keep pace with the scale and speed of PhaaS operations. ZeroFox's Global Disruption Network identifies malicious domains targeting financial institutions and initiates takedown procedures across multiple channels simultaneously — including domain registrars, hosting providers, social networks, and ISPs, with some takedowns completed in under 15 minutes.

What’s more, as a founding partner with Google Cloud in an initiative to end phishing attacks across 5 billion devices worldwide, ZeroFox doesn't stop at just block phishing sites — it helps dismantle the entire phishing infrastructure at its source.

• Comprehensive Multi-Channel Coverage

PhaaS operators exploit every possible attack vector, which is why ZeroFox provides comprehensive anti-phishing protection across all platforms where phishing occurs. Whether attacks come through email, social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), malicious domains, or fraudulent mobile apps in app stores, ZeroFox quickly spots phishing links, sites, and posts, working to eliminate the systems behind those campaigns.

• Seamless Security Integration

ZeroFox's platform is purpose-built on microservices and APIs to enable every data point, IOC, remediation action, and contextualized alert to be delivered in real-time within your existing security workflows. With integrations into TIP, SIEM, SOAR, and Business Intelligence platforms, ZeroFox ensures that:

• Domain monitoring feeds directly into your incident response platform, triggering automatic customer warnings before the first victim clicks
• Threat intelligence connects to email security, letting you identify campaigns targeting peer institutions and block them preemptively
• When takedown systems share data with fraud detection, compromised accounts can be frozen before money moves.

Financial institutions implementing integrated PhaaS defense with ZeroFox are switching from playing defense to controlling the game, preventing countless phishing attacks before they reached a single victim. 

The results speak for themselves:

In just 6-12 months alone, ZeroFox secured over 75,000 takedowns, 193,000 executive impersonation alerts, 396,000 brand impersonation alerts, and the removal of more than 1 million pieces of fraudulent content.

With the average bill for a data breach reaching $6.1 million, preventing a single incident can save a fortune in direct costs. 

But the value isn't only in avoiding losses — it's also about preserving customer trust that’s earned over years or decades, but can be destroyed in just moments. Not to mention the additional downstream costs of fraud investigation, customer remediation, regulatory reporting, and even criminal liability.

Future-Proof Against Phishing-as-a-Service in FinServ 

The underground economy shows no signs of slowing — if anything, Phishing-as-a-Service prices keep dropping while sophistication increases. So, the question isn't whether criminals will target your organization, it’s whether you'll see them coming.

To protect customer assets, preserve trust, and deliver seamless services, you need to stop Phishing-as-a-Service where it starts: in dark web forums, on social platforms, and everywhere across the external attack surface that traditional security ignores.

Find out why five of the world’s top 10 FinServ companies rely on ZeroFox to secure their brand against PhaaS by downloading the InfoSec Guide to Phishing and Financial Fraud or evaluate your PhaaS exposure with ZeroFox's external threat assessment.