The threat actors behind the Darcula phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform appear to be readying a new version that allows prospective customers and cyber crooks to clone any brand’s legitimate website and create a phishing version, further bringing down the technical expertise required to pull off phishing attacks at scale.
The latest iteration of the phishing suite “represents a significant shift in criminal capabilities, reducing the barrier to entry for bad actors to target any brand with complex, customizable phishing campaigns,” Netcraft said in a new analysis.
The cybersecurity company said it has detected and blocked more than 95,000 new Darcula phishing domains, nearly 31,000 IP addresses, and taken down more than 20,000 fraudulent websites since it was first exposed in late March 2024.
The biggest change incorporated into Darcula is the ability for any user to generate a phishing kit for any brand in an on-demand fashion.
“The new and remastered version is now ready for testing,” the core developers behind the service said in a post made on January 19, 2025, in a Telegram channel that has over 1,200 subscribers.
“Now, you can also customize the front-end yourself. Using darcula-suite, you can complete the production of a front-end in 10 minutes.”
To do this, all a customer has to do is provide the URL of the brand to be impersonated in a web interface, with the platform employing a browser automation tool like Puppeteer to export the HTML and all required assets.
Users can then select the HTML element to replace and inject the phishing content (e.g., payment forms and login fields) such that it matches the look and feel of the branded landing page. The generated phishing page is then uploaded to an admin panel.
“Like any Software-as-a-Service product, the darcula-suite PhaaS platform provides admin dashboards that make it simple for fraudsters to manage their various campaigns,” security researcher Harry Freeborough said.
“Once generated, these kits are uploaded to another platform where criminals can manage their active campaigns, find extracted data, and monitor their deployed phishing campaigns.”
Besides featuring dashboards that highlight the aggregated performance statistics of the phishing campaigns, Darcula v3 goes a step further by offering a way to convert the stolen credit card details into a virtual image of the victim’s card that can be scanned and added to a digital wallet for illicit purposes. Specifically, the cards are loaded onto burner phones and sold to other criminals.
The tool is said to be currently in the internal testing stage. In a follow-up post dated February 10, 2025, the malware author posted the message: “I have been busy these days, so the v3 update will be postponed for a few days.”
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