Your brand is the image your customers have of your business; this is precisely what makes your brand into such a valuable asset. It’s no surprise that brand presence is increasingly shifting into the digital realm. And while digital transformation brings with it a whole new world of possibilities, the digitization of the brand also introduces new risks.

If anyone has benefitted from the pandemic, it has been cyber attackers. As businesses expanded their investment in cloud resources and other IT resources in response to the pandemic, cyberattacks also dramatically increased. Businesses reported 445 million cyberattack incidents in 2020, double the rate for 2019. It didn’t have to be this way. With stronger threat intelligence solutions in place, many of the security incidents of 2020 could likely have been averted.

In yet another example of VPN appliance vulnerabilities being actively exploited by threat actors, 20 April 2021 saw the publication of a critical Pulse Connect Secure (PCS) SSL VPN appliance vulnerability, CVE-2021-22893, allowing an authentication bypass that leads to an unauthenticated threat actor gaining the ability to remotely execute arbitrary code on a PCS gateway.

Over the last few weeks, Cyberint has witnessed an ongoing attack campaign targeting social media influencers, attempting to infect them with malware by impersonating large clothing retailers. The campaign targets influencers across multiple social media platforms but currently appears to mostly focus on influencers operating on YouTube. Further, although the infection process is not sophisticated, it is notable and appears to be evolving.

In the last couple of decades, the retail industry has seen dramatic changes, both on the business and on the consumer side. Perhaps the most notable one is buyers’ ever-increasing shift from physical “brick-and-mortar” retailers to online e-commerce platforms. Unfortunately, this has also been accompanied by more and more fraudulent activities, which in turn required for more digital checks and balances.