AI-Generated Zoom Impersonation Attack Exploits Tax Season to Deploy Remote Desktop Tool

Cybercriminals are now using the same AI-powered tools trusted by developers to craft near-flawless imitations of well-known brands—and delivering these deceptions with strategic timing and precision targeting.

Disguised as a routine Zoom meeting invitation related to the 2024 tax season, a campaign recently stopped by Abnormal leveraged generative AI to construct a highly convincing phishing page. However, unlike traditional credential-harvesting scams, these attacks attempted to deceive targets into downloading a remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool—granting threat actors full control over their devices.

Abnormal identified nearly 250 unique organizations targeted by this campaign. The attack spanned multiple industries, but retailers/consumer goods manufacturers and finance organizations were hit the most, accounting for 14% and 13% of the total number of organizations targeted, respectively.

The tactics of these threat actors reveal a calculated evolution in attack methodology, demanding a closer examination of how attackers are leveraging AI-driven tools to amplify both scale and believability.

The attack begins with a carefully engineered phishing email designed to appear as a meeting invitation from Zoom. The email’s subject line references a seemingly legitimate purpose: "Meeting Invite - 2024 Tax Organizer SID:80526353241,” tying in timely tax season relevance to make the message feel even more genuine.

The message features familiar Zoom branding and a prominent button labeled “View Invitation,” encouraging the recipient to click.

Once clicked, the target is redirected to a malicious site likely built using Vercel’s v0 tool, with the URL zoom-meeting-details.vercel.app. The page, mimicking Zoom’s interface, claims that the user does not have the latest version of the Zoom Workspace App and that the newest version would automatically download.

Within seconds, the site opens a new browser tab, prompting the download of a file named Zoom.ClientSetup.exe.

But this isn’t a legitimate Zoom installer. The executable file is, in fact, a remote desktop tool intended to grant the perpetrators full control over the target’s machine.

While impersonation attacks are nothing new, this campaign blended timing, generative AI, and subtle social engineering in a particularly effective way.

First, the email originated from a compromised legitimate account, lending credibility and making it less likely to be flagged by security tools. The use of a 2024 tax organizer meeting as the hook was also timely and relevant, tapping into the stress and urgency many people feel during tax season.

Further, rather than simply directing users to a phishing page to steal credentials, the threat actors attempted to deploy an RMM directly onto the victim’s device. Although RMMs such as ScreenConnect are frequently leveraged in cyberattacks, delivering them through what appears to be a routine Zoom meeting invite is far less typical.

Most importantly, the attackers likely used v0 by Vercel to generate malicious infrastructure with minimal effort and maximum realism. v0 was created to help developers quickly build full UIs from simple text prompts. Essentially, it acts like an AI-powered designer and front-end developer in one, enabling users to turn plain ideas or mockups into production-ready layouts in seconds. What once required meticulous coding and design expertise can now be accomplished with a few sentences—a capability the perpetrators impressively exploited.

The challenge with this campaign wasn’t just the believable visuals—it was the attackers’ use of AI to create an experience that felt genuine.

The design was polished, the language sounded professional, and the workflow mirrored what users might expect from an actual Zoom prompt. For a human, there were very few signals that something was off. The remote monitoring and management download was disguised as a legitimate Zoom update, reducing the likelihood of end-users questioning its authenticity. The fact that the email was sent from a real, compromised account further reduced suspicion.

For legacy security tools, which rely on static indicators and known malicious patterns, the dynamic, AI-generated nature of the site made it progressively more difficult to flag. Hosting the landing page on a reputable platform like Vercel further complicated detection, as security tools typically trust domains linked to well-known development ecosystems. And with no traditional phishing links present—just a cleverly disguised download—the attack was engineered to evade both automatic filters and manual scrutiny.

This campaign illustrates just how quickly attackers are adopting the same AI tools that defenders use. With platforms like v0 making it easy for anyone—including malicious actors—to build convincing, production-quality interfaces, the bar for phishing realism has been raised.

Defending against these attacks requires more than basic link scanning or signature-based detection. It calls for intelligent systems capable of understanding behavior patterns, flagging anomalies, and recognizing when something is out of place.

As generative AI continues to empower threat actors to innovate and identify new ways to exploit both technological vulnerabilities and human trust, only AI-native email security solutions that go beyond static indicators of compromise can provide the level of protection organizations need.

For even more insights into the threat landscape and predictions for where it’s headed, download our report, Inbox Under Siege: 5 Email Attacks You Need to Know for 2025.