The second quarter of this year has become the focus of some new firsts in ransomware attacks, according to new data from cybersecurity vendor Reliaquest. None of us want to see ransomware continue “up and to the right” on a chart. But it appears that this is the case, according to Reliaquest’s Ransomware Report: Q2 2023.
Cybercriminals used the legitimacy of Salesforce’s email gateway to bypass security scanners and target Meta customers in an effort to steal Facebook credentials. One of the initial challenges any phishing attack has is to make it past security measures designed to scan and identify malicious emails. One such way is to misuse a legitimate well-known platform’s outbound sending of emails.
The latest data from Comcast Business’ analysis of over 23.5 billion cyber attacks on their business customers shows the importance and role of phishing in attacks. Over the years there has been a consistent mantra, where everyone agrees that “90-something” percent of cyber attacks start with phishing. There have been plenty of sources that corroborate this using percentages in the 90th percentile, but the overall message is phishing is your greatest Initial Access tactic.
Most social engineering scams search out their potential victims, often sending emails to known email addresses, sending chat messages to them or calling known phone numbers. The attackers take an active role in seeking out and making contact with their victims.
At Black Hat USA 2023, a session led by a team of security researchers, including Fredrik Heiding, Bruce Schneier, Arun Vishwanath, and Jeremy Bernstein, unveiled an intriguing experiment. They tested large language models (LLMs) to see how they performed in both writing convincing phishing emails and detecting them. This is the PDF technical paper.
A record 2,322 scams in Japan to steal internet banking IDs and passwords have resulted in unauthorized money transfers totaling a record of around 3 billion yen ($21 million) in the first half of this year, a report by the National Police Agency showed Tuesday. The number of cases mainly involving phishing this year has already surpassed the annual total of any previous year, with the financial loss approaching the record high of 3.07 billion yen set in 2015, according to the agency.
Scammers are taking advantage of Twitter’s rebranding to “X,” according to Stephanie Adlam at Gridinsoft. A phishing campaign is targeting Twitter Blue users by telling them they need to transfer their subscription to X.
As the retirement countdown for the current version of PCI is now less than six months, a new standard for password length, complexity, and change frequency may create some risk. Valid credentials have become a very hot item, as threat actors realize the low risk and high value of simply becoming an Initial Access Broker (rather than performing an entire cyber attack themselves).
