The nature of LinkedIn’s professional environment facilitates communication among individuals from various backgrounds across industries. However, threat actors have been known to exploit the business networking platform for malicious aims, including intelligence gathering, identity theft and spear phishing. A number of fake profiles identified on the site have been observed targeting individuals in diverse sectors, particularly those with roles in government, cyber security and education.

SocGholish, also known as FakeUpdate, is a JavaScript framework leveraged in social engineering drive by compromises that has been a thorn in cybersecurity professionals’ and organizations’ sides for at least 5 years now. Upon visiting a compromised website, users are redirected to a page for a browser update and a zip archive file containing a malicious JavaScript file is downloaded and unfortunately often opened and executed by the fooled end user.

The government of a U.S. county announced on September 11 that a recent cyber incident had disrupted its online services. Subsequent coverage of the event has noted that it strongly resembles a ransomware attack. The disruption comes against a backdrop of frequent ransomware activity targeting state and local governments and the education sector.

In what seems to be a constant drip of headlines about large enterprises experiencing security incidents, the world most recently learned of a successful data infiltration of rideshare and delivery company Uber. In a blog update, Uber attributed the attack to the infamous Lapsus$ group that has made a name for itself over the past year with successful breaches of household names including Microsoft, Rockstar Games, Samsung, Nvidia, Ubisoft, and Okta.

Social engineering is the psychological manipulation used to get others to do things or reveal private information. Between 70% and 90% of data breaches involve social engineering. Social engineering is currently one of the largest cybersecurity dangers facing both small and large enterprises. These “human hacking” techniques are commonly used in cybercrime to trick unwary users into disclosing information, dispersing malware infections or granting access to restricted systems.

When most people think about the origin of a cyberattack, the image is that of a hacker using some kind of exploit against software or hardware in order to gain unauthorized access to systems. The hacker is seeking data to exfiltrate and monetize, either through re-sale on the darknet or extortion through ransomware.