It’s always frustrating when your laptop starts to slow down. The more you click, the more it seems to stutter and have a good think about everything you ask it to do. Joining video calls and even opening documents becomes a chore. Normally, this is a sign to free up some storage space or request a new device/component from the IT department. However, an unusually slow laptop can also be the sign of something more sinister – cryptojacking.

Phishing emails are a serious problem for both businesses and consumers. Phishers use phishing emails to steal users’ personal information, like usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers and other sensitive data.

Recently, we observed a malware spam campaign leveraging the current COVID-19 situation. The emails were sent from a compromised mailbox using a mailer script. The message contains a link leading to a Word document. The email takes advantage of a COVID-19 test mandate as a pretext to lure the unsuspecting user into clicking the link and downloading the document. Figure 1. COVID-19 themed malspam with link to the malicious document.

2021 has been another challenging year for businesses, not least because of the ongoing wave of cyberattacks. Everyone is hoping for some good news in 2022, but realistically, cybercrime slowing down won’t be on the agenda. Cybersecurity and avoiding the threat of data breaches is going to be front of mind for many going into next year. We’ve spoken to two members of our leadership team who’ve shared their thoughts on four trends we’re likely to encounter in 2022.

Gmail is an immensely popular service, with nearly 2 billion active accounts. And as the service has grown, businesses have turned to it for all kinds of things it was never meant to do: user authentication, password recovery, and perhaps most problematic, the passing of sensitive or regulated data between parties.

The way in which we respond to email security risks needs to change. It’s no longer a case of reinforcing the network perimeter. The risks are now far more complex and nuanced, driven by human behaviour. From every conversation we have, Security and IT leaders tell us that people: These are a combination of both inbound and outbound threats but what they have in common is that they are human-activated risks – there’s a person behind each of them.