Phishing is a pretty straightforward scam. Get victims to click on a link they shouldn’t. In that regard, hackers never stop evolving and coming up with clever new ways to trick victims into clicking. And it seems they’ve done it again.
The trick of course is to make a malicious URL look legitimate. In that endeavor, hackers are now using the date to make phishing URLs look normal. According to an article on PCMag website, “Scammers have been incorporating the date into their malicious internet domains to help them spoof legitimate websites.”
If you’re responsible for email security at your company, then you’re acutely aware of the role that social engineering plays in effective phishing attacks. Social engineering is not a technology hack, it’s psychology hack. It doesn’t exploit technological weakness, it exploits human weakness. You can be sure the next phishing attack launched upon your organization will have, at its roots, social engineering.
The newest Star Wars movie due out this week, The Rise of Skywalker, could just as easily be titled The Rise of Hackers, because they’re using the release of the over-hyped movie to target fans with a phishing attack.
As reported in SC Magazine, “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is just being released into theaters today but cybercriminals were already assembling fake websites and social media profiles to deliver malware to fans, instead of something useful like the Death Star’s plans.”
If it’s a popular consumer service, you can bet that eventually, hackers will use it in phishing attacks. First it was Netflix, then it was Instagram and then Google and now Spotify.
Almost all communication with the services you use today is via email. Hackers know it, and that’s why phishing attacks aren’t going away any time soon. This time, it’s hackers going after Spotify customers with a phishing email that warns you that your payment didn’t go through.
If you invest in phishing protection software, which you should, you probably think you’re safe from phishing attacks. It would be nice if that were true, but it’s not. Unfortunately, we live in a tightly-coupled financial ecosystem where vulnerability to one of us is a vulnerability to all.
I’ll bet that when you stay at a hotel, you don’t give much thought to how the hotel’s vulnerability to phishing attacks can affect you. But you should. Because we live in a tightly-coupled financial ecosystem. And because the hospitality industry is under attack from cybercriminals.
Government-backed cyberspies are always looking for a way to gain access to people’s sensitive information. One of their favorite targets is their Google account, since so many people store information there. And even if they don’t, a Google account can be a critical access point to sensitive information stored elsewhere.
So, what technique do you suppose these cyberspies prefer when it comes to hacking someone’s Google account? Is it a brute force password attack? How about a SQL injection attack? Man-in-the-middle attack? Nope. None of them.
Everyone’s on the lookout for phishing emails today (or if they’re not, they should be). Some people are on high alert and are really good at spotting them. Are you?
What if you received an email that you were convinced was a phishing email, with all the telltale signs, but it wasn’t? That’s exactly what happened to customers of TriNet, one of the largest outsourced human resources providers in the United States, primarily for small-to-medium-sized businesses.
What’s the old saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Apparently the shame is on the healthcare industry.
Despite numerous successful phishing attacks on healthcare organizations affecting almost 40 million people, the industry is still not sufficiently motivated to protect itself. From Security Boulevard, “to date in 2019 there have been 326 Hacking/IT Incidents affecting some 39,050,355 individuals. Of these incidents, 208 of them have been via email phishing attacks.”
At the end of the day, most phishing emails are based on the same thing: a plausible financial transaction. An email shows up, it involves a financial transaction you’re been expecting, you don’t give it another thought, you get phished.
The latest phishing scam is an email targeting homeowners seeking to secure a loan to purchase their home. According to Komo News, “It’s from someone using the name Larry Conrad with First American Title in Phoenix, Arizona. The greeting doesn’t address you by name but only says Hello—that’s your first clue. It says the loan has been cleared to close and the preliminary closing documents are attached.”
By now, most people know about the potential threat from business email compromise orBEC. With BEC, someone in a company gets their email taken over by a hacker and the hacker uses the trust implied in that email to exploit others in the company.
“Formerly dubbed as Man-in-the-Email scams, BEC attackers rely heavily on social engineering tactics to trick unsuspecting employees and executives. Often, they impersonate the CEO or any executive authorized to do wire transfers.” As bad as BEC is, at least it threatens just a single company—the one with the compromised email.
When you tell me that phishers go after large enterprises, I get it. There’s a lot of valuable data there. When you tell that they go after banks, cause that’s where the money is, I understand. But, when you tell me they’re going after relief agencies, I call them cold-hearted.
That’s the news making headlines from researchers at Lookout Security. According to a blog post there, they have “detected a mobile-aware phishing campaign targeting non-governmental organizations around the world, including a variety of United Nations humanitarian organizations, such as UNICEF.”
Given the proliferation of the internet and e-mails as the preferred means of communication, ransomware attacks are on an upward spree. Malware attacks 2017 show that nearly 40% of all e-mail spam contains ransomware. It brings forth the question, what exactly is ransomware?
It is a malware attack that cripples the victim’s files with unbreakable encryption. The cyber attacker then demands money, usually in the form of cryptocurrency (such as Bitcoins) to unlock the data. Hackers can spread ransomware through malicious e-mail attachments, infected external storage devices, infected software apps, and compromised websites. Some attacks also use remote desktop protocol and other approaches which do not rely on any user interaction.
Netflix, the popular online entertainment and video streaming site, has millions of subscribers and hence is a tempting target for the cybercriminals that look to hack into email accounts to gain illegitimate access to services. When they target many, even a small percentage of success could mean something significant.
If you work at an organization, there’s a pretty good chance you’re in for a yearly performance appraisal. And if you are, it’s likely that someone from human resources will send you an email around that time reminding you of that. But beware, that email may not be what you think it is.
There’s a new corporate phishing attack going on that involves hackers sending unsuspecting employees an email notifying them of their upcoming performance appraisal. The hacker’s use of social engineering in this attack is very clever because they convince the victims that the appraisal is mandatory and that they might get a pay raise. So, pretty much everyone who receives it will respond to it.
When you think of phishing, you probably think of ransomware (which you should). And when you think of ransomware, you probably think about money (which you should). The money the hackers are trying to get as a ransom.
There’s no doubt that most phishing attacks, either directly or indirectly, are about money. But not all. According to an article on KnowBe4, “Universities worldwide are the target of phishing attacks by a hacking group aimed at stealing research and intellectual property.“
As previously discussed on this blog, Instagram is now more popular than Facebook when it comes to phishing attacks. As the article detailed, Instagram is popular as a target for phishing attacks because Instagram phishing attacks can so easily go viral, given that every victim can quickly lead to hundreds of more emails to trusted relationships.
Well, the folks at Facebook, the company that owns Instagram, heard the cries for help and decided to do something about it. To that end they are rolling out a new tool to protect Instagram users from phishing attacks. There’s just one problem: it won’t work.
You might think that phishing emails from these “third world” countries would be unsophisticated and easy to detect. You’d be wrong.
First North Korea. According to the Digital Journal, “Several U.S. businesses have been targeted by a campaign seemingly to originate from North Korea and using the tactic of spear-phishing. The cyber-assault is sophisticated, using legitimate documents as the targets.”
At this point, mentioning a new Google attack vector is almost not news anymore, given how many times the company’s services have been exploited. It’s to be expected though. Google makes most of its service available free of charge, which means not only do you have free access to it, so do hackers. And given these services’ widespread adoption, it’s not surprising that Google is a frequent target.
When hackers go after you with phishing emails, you’ll never guess which brand they impersonate the most. Microsoft. “Given the ubiquity of Windows and Office, as well as other services including the Outlook.com webmail service and Xbox Live, Microsoft’s position at the top of the list should come as no surprise.”
You’ll never guess which popular Calendar app was used to phish Gmail users earlier this year. Google Calendar. For a long time now, Google Calendar has had a major flaw. If someone sends an event request to your Gmail account, it automatically assumes you want to go and adds it to your calendar. It does so even if the event request is an attempt to phish you.
Got an Android Phone? You’re going to love this. Attackers can now take control of your phone over-the-air.
From Check Point Research, “Check Point Researchers have identified a susceptibility to advanced phishing attacks in certain modern Android-based phones, including models by Samsung, Huawei, LG and Sony. In these attacks, a remote agent can trick users into accepting new phone settings that, for example, route all their Internet traffic through a proxy controlled by the attacker. This attack vector relies on a process called over-the-air (OTA) provisioning, which is normally used by cellular network operators to deploy network-specific settings to a new phone joining their network. However, as we show, anyone can send OTA provisioning messages.”
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