The 2025 holiday shopping season is characterized by an unprecedented surge in cyber threats, with attackers deploying industrialized infrastructure to exploit the global increase in online commerce.
Mass Creation of Fraudulent Infrastructure
This year's threat landscape involves a calculated expansion of deceptive digital assets. Criminals are leveraging automated tools to scale their operations across multiple merchant
categories. The primary attack vector is the mass creation of look alike websites designed to mimic legitimate retailers and capture sensitive consumer data during peak shopping periods.
A significant indicator of this pre holiday offensive is the registration of over 18,000 holiday themed domains in the past three months alone. These domains target high traffic keywords such as "Christmas," "Black Friday," and "Flash Sale." While many domains remain inactive to evade early detection, hundreds have already been weaponized to host gift card scams and payment harvesting pages.
Fortinet security analysts identified this extensive network of malicious infrastructure, noting that the campaign's sheer scale facilitates effective SEO poisoning. By artificially inflating the search rankings of these malicious URLs, attackers ensure their fraudulent sites appear alongside legitimate results during peak traffic.
The researchers also highlighted a disturbing rise in credential theft, with over 1.57 million login accounts from major e commerce sites currently circulating in underground markets. These "stealer logs" contain browser stored passwords, cookies, and session tokens, enabling rapid account takeovers that bypass traditional login defenses.
Technical Exploitation of Platform Vulnerabilities
The sophistication of these attacks is most evident in the targeted exploitation of critical e commerce platform vulnerabilities. Attackers are actively leveraging CVE 2025 54236, a critical flaw in Adobe Magento caused by improper input validation. This vulnerability allows threat actors to execute a Remote Code Execution (RCE) attack, effectively bypassing authentication layers to achieve session takeover.
By injecting malicious payloads into unvalidated input fields, attackers gain administrative access, enabling them to install persistent backdoors or JavaScript based web skimmers directly onto checkout pages. Additionally, the exploitation of CVE 2025 61882 in Oracle E Business Suite permits unauthenticated RCE, allowing ransomware groups to paralyze backend inventory systems. These technical incursions are executed via automated scripts that continuously probe for unpatched systems, transforming a single vulnerability into a gateway for massive data exfiltration.
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