Bypassing the Gatekeepers: How a Global Phishing Campaign Turns Google's Infrastructure into a Trust Proxy
KnowBe4, Friday, September 4th, 2026
KnowBe4 Threat Lab details a phishing campaign chaining six Google services to bypass email gateways and firewalls.
KnowBe4's Threat Lab analyzed an active, wide-scale phishing campaign that routes victims through a deliberate chain of legitimate Google services before delivering them to credential harvesters or remote access tooling.
Because email security gateways, enterprise firewalls and automated URL detonation platforms treat Google infrastructure as trusted, the redirect chain functions as a trust proxy that defeats reputation-based filtering.
Researchers documented six distinct Google properties abused across multiple redirect paths. The analysis breaks down the landing page behavior and the full execution chain, which the team describes as unusually complete for a campaign of this scale.