While digging through some recent cybersecurity reports, I came across a fascinating and concerning campaign. Threat actors have been running a large-scale phishing operation using multilingual ZIP files to target organizations across East and Southeast Asia. It wasn’t just random spam — it was coordinated, multilingual, and very calculated.
They used Traditional Chinese, English, and Japanese to tailor their attacks to each region. The emails and web templates were customized to look as authentic as possible, depending on who they were targeting. It’s one of those times where I realize how advanced phishing operations have become — they feel more like marketing campaigns than old-school scams.
How the Attack Spread
At first, the attackers focused on Taiwan. They pretended to be the country’s Ministry of Finance and sent out fake PDFs hosted on cloud platforms. Eventually, they leveled up by creating their own infrastructure, registering domains that looked official — often ending in “.tw” — and expanding their reach into Japan and other Southeast Asian countries.
They used clever tricks to avoid detection. When someone landed on their fake website, a hidden script called visitor_log.php would quietly collect information about the visitor — things like IP address and browser type. Only after that would a download button appear, leading to a ZIP file that seemed harmless but contained malicious content. The way they designed it made it almost invisible to most filters.
Inside the ZIP Files
The files inside these ZIP archives were disguised to look like everyday business documents. They had names like “Payroll Report,” “Tax Summary,” or “Financial Confirmation.” On the surface, they appeared professional and legitimate, which helped them bypass many content-based filters and fool even cautious employees.
Another detail that stood out to me was how these phishing pages all seemed to share the same structure. The same file names kept appearing across multiple sites — download.php, visitor_log.php, and others — suggesting that all of them were powered by a shared backend or some kind of phishing kit. It’s like the attackers had created a framework they could deploy anywhere, in any language.
Distributed Hosting
The infrastructure behind this campaign wasn’t limited to one region. The domains were hosted by a Hong Kong-based provider but spread across several major cities like Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. This distributed setup made it much harder for defenders to block the entire operation, since every time one domain went down, another one could easily take its place.
My Opinion
To me, this campaign really highlights how professional and methodical cybercriminals have become. They understand language, culture, and how to manipulate trust. What used to be simple, mass spam attacks have evolved into region-specific, data-driven phishing campaigns that can fool even experienced users.
The use of multilingual content, customized ZIP files, and distributed hosting shows that these attackers are treating cybercrime like a global business. It’s efficient, adaptive, and hard to detect. I think this kind of operation is a glimpse into where phishing is headed — smarter, more targeted, and far more dangerous than before.
Mourad Maacha 
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