Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week we’re looking at four ways you can protect yourself from increasingly advanced social engineering attacks.

Azura Vascular Care operates a national network of health and wellness centers. They specialize in minimally invasive procedures and strive to treat vascular conditions in comfortable, out-patient settings. They offer healthcare in 25 states with multiple facilities and specialized teams. At the end of last year (2023), Azura discovered a threat actor within their network environment; officials removed the threat, but not before the criminals obtained 348k patient records.

Trustwave SpiderLabs is wrapping up a multi-month investigation into the threats facing the education sector, across higher education, primary and secondary schools. Trustwave will post the 2024 Education Threat Landscape: Trustwave Threat Intelligence Briefing and Mitigation Strategies report on February 22, but here are a couple of early findings along with a round-up of some of the higher-profile attacks on education targets that have taken place in the last year.

The phenomenal growth in the adoption of software as a service (SaaS) has prompted enterprises of all sizes to move their critical data to SaaS-based applications. And as attackers tend to follow data to induce a breach, their new area of focus is enterprise SaaS. The recent Midnight Blizzard attack by nation-state actors clearly reinforces the fact that this trend has only just begun.

New data sheds light on what kinds of cyber attacks are targeting your cybersecurity team, what it’s costing them, why it’s taking so much time to fix, and where you should focus resources. Barracuda’s Cybernomics 101 report provides a lot of insight into the current economics of cyber attacks. According to the report: The average largest ransom any organization paid is $1.38 million, with an average cost of $5.34 million to respond to compromises!

On February 7, 2024, CISA issued an advisory detailing their discoveries concerning state-sponsored cyber actors linked to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Notably, the PRC-affiliated threat actor, Volt Typhoon, is actively engaged in efforts to infiltrate IT networks, with the potential aim of launching cyber attacks on vital U.S. infrastructure in the event of a substantial crisis or conflict with the United States.

A new report shows massive increases in browser attacks in the second half of 2023, with over 31,000 threats specifically designed to bypass security solution detection. I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about phishing, social engineering, smishing, deepfakes and more – all topics centered around attack techniques designed to interact and fool a user.

A new and concerning chapter has unfolded in these troubled times of geopolitical chaos. The Cozy Bear threat actor has caused significant breaches targeting Microsoft and HPE, and more are likely to come. These recent events have sent shockwaves throughout the tech community, and for good reason. As we continue to uncover the fallout from these breaches, it has become apparent that the magnitude of the incident is more significant than we first realized.