The evidence is clear – there is nothing most people and organizations can do to vastly lower cybersecurity risk than to mitigate social engineering attacks. Social engineering is involved in 70%-90% of all successful attacks. No other root cause of initial breach comes close (unpatched software is involved in 20% to 40% of attacks and everything else is in the single digits). Every person and organization should create their best possible defense-in-depth plan to fight social engineering.

The Cyberwire reported: "Barracuda released a study this morning indicating that HTML attacks have doubled since last year. The researchers note that not only is the total number of attacks increasing, but the number of unique attacks seems to be increasing as well.

The most common route for malware infections remains social engineering in its various forms: phishing, vishing, etc. Such approaches take advantage of users’ deliberately cultivated willingness to trust communications they receive and to follow the instructions and links such malicious communications carry.

Walmart’s rise to become the brand most likely to be impersonated in Q1 of this year is a real problem. If you’ve been paying attention to brand impersonation in phishing attacks, you know the premise is to use a brand that a large number of potential victims do business with as a means of both establishing credibility. For many quarters, we continually saw Microsoft and/or Microsoft 365 as the brand of choice due to its wide use.

March saw a huge jump in ransomware compared to January and February, signifying that organizations should expect to see a lot more of these attacks this year. With security solutions getting good at spotting and stopping malware on endpoints and servers, you’d think that ransomware attacks would be dwindling. But, according to the NCC Group’s Cyber Threat Report for March 2023, it feels a lot more like 2023 is going to be a repeat of 2022, but at significantly higher attack levels.

The malwareless and seemingly benign nature of business email compromise emails, mixed with impersonation techniques, are difficult to spot as being malicious, making them even more dangerous. I’ve covered both the threat of business email compromise and response-based email attacks before. How can I not? They are prominent techniques used by phishing scammers everywhere. But it’s the reported combination of the two by Phish Labs that has me concerned.

I get the WSJ Cybersecurity newsletter, which by the way is warmly recommended. Kim Nash today reported a shocker which will make everyone's insurance premiums go even further up: "Six years after the worldwide NotPetya cyberattack, a court ruled insurers for Merck & Co. must help cover $1.4 billion in losses. New Jersey appellate division judges rejected the insurers' argument that the 2017 attack, which U.S.

Phishing is a familiar criminal tactic. It’s also used by intelligence services for cyber espionage campaigns. On Friday, April 28th, 2023, CERT-UA, Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team, reported that Russian operators are sending phishing emails that misrepresent themselves as sending instructions on installing a Windows security update.

Since the beginning, two types of computer attacks (known as initial root cause exploits) have composed the vast majority of successful attacks: social engineering and exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities. These two root causes account for somewhere between 50% to 90% of all successful attacks.

Compromised websites (legitimate sites that have been successfully compromised to support social engineering) are serving visitors fake Google Chrome update error messages. “Google Chrome users who use the browser regularly should be wary of a new attack campaign that distributes malware by posing as a Google Chrome update error message,” Trend Micro warns. “The attack campaign has been operational since February 2023 and has a large impact area.”