Description

Researchers at Netcraft revealed two massive phishing campaigns associated with the Lucid and Lighthouse Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) platforms. Combined, these services launched more than 17,500 phishing domains that attacked 316 brands in 74 countries. Lucid exhibited sophisticated evasion techniques, revealing phishing content only when visitors met criteria like mobile user agents or proxy origins, while presenting false storefronts otherwise. Lighthouse, created by "WangDuoYu," was a paid service that cost up to $1,588 a year, with capabilities to evade two-factor authentication and provide regularly updated phishing templates. Shared infrastructure and common techniques indicated collaboration between cybercrime groups by investigators. The emergence of PhaaS shows the commercialization of cybercrime, reducing barriers to entry for attackers and making large-scale attacks possible. In place of technical expertise, low-level offenders can now buy subscriptions to pre-made phishing kits with brand impersonation and embedded evasion tools. By June 2025, Netcraft stated that 13.5% of all Phishing hostnames were being driven by PhaaS, illustrating their accelerating growth. With tools capable of targeting finance, government, logistics, and postal service industries across various regions and languages, such platforms provide a critical global threat. The interlinked nature of Lucid, Lighthouse, and affiliated groups also demonstrates the manner in which cybercrime ecosystems consolidate resources to optimize damage. Organizations need to bolster defenses with sophisticated phishing detection, automated takedown capabilities, and real-time sharing of intelligence. Phishing-resistant MFA like hardware keys or FIDO2 authentication can help neutralize stolen credentials. Security teams need to also run regular employee awareness training to enable staff to identify phishing attempts. Overall, cooperation between ISPs, law enforcement, and security vendors is crucial to take down PhaaS infrastructure. Proactive monitoring, swift disruption, and intelligence-driven defense measures are vital to address the increasing scale and sophistication of phishing-as-a-service.