Even when looking at the various kinds of risks to business, cyber attacks still remain the biggest problem. But new data shows there may be a lesson to be learned to minimize losses. Aon’s Global Risk Management Survey, nearly 3,000 organizations across 61 countries were asked about sources of business risk. In the report, “Cyber Attack/Data Breach” was the #1 current risk and #1 future risk seen by organizations.

Surveys, unfortunately, show that the vast majority of organizations do little to no security awareness training. The average organization, if it does security awareness training, does it once annually, likely as part of a compliance program. It is not enough We know from customer data collected, involving many tens of millions of records, over 10 years, that the more frequently an organization does training and simulated phishing, the better able their staff is able to spot phishing attacks.

When 97% of CIOs all see things the same way, it’s probably a sign to take the risk of cyber threats seriously – a problem new data shows is only going to get worse in the next five years. I cover a ton of reports from cybersecurity vendors on our blog, but when you see a network infrastructure vendor put out a report with intent on just covering the challenges organizations are facing and they have some interesting data on cybersecurity, it got my attention.

You would be hard-pressed to find an author and organization (KnowBe4) that has pushed the use of phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA) harder. When the world was touting “MFA,” we were shouting “PHISHING-RESISTANT MFA” even louder, including here: Today, many of the world’s leading cybersecurity voices, including CISA, Microsoft and Google are pushing phishing-resistant MFA. Here is CISA’s take on it.

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, the battle against ransomware has taken a concerning turn. According to the latest findings from Secureworks annual State of the Threat Report, the deployment of ransomware is now occurring within just one day of initial access in more than half of all engagements.

The ransomware attack on ICBC Financial Services caused disruption of trading of U.S. Treasuries and marked a new level of breach that could have massive repercussions. When we saw the attack on the Colonial Pipeline back in 2021, the impact was felt throughout the Southeast United States. Any attack on key businesses that keeps an economy running will have some form of impact should the attack be successful.

A phishing campaign is impersonating Disney+ with phony invoices, according to researchers at Abnormal Security. The phishing emails targeted individuals at 22 organizations in September. “The first step in this multi-stage attack is a seemingly auto-generated notification email informing the target of a pending charge for their new Disney+ subscription,” the researchers explain.

On July 26, the U.S. Security & Exchange Commission (SEC) announced several new cybersecurity rules, taking affect mid-December 2023, that will significantly impact all U.S. organizations (and foreign entities doing business in the U.S.) that must follow SEC regulations. Although the announcement did not generate a ton of fanfare off the normal business and cybersecurity sites, the rules will greatly increase resource requirements and actions.

New data shows how the overwhelming majority of phishing attacks on financial institutions dwarf every other industry sector by as much as a factor of 30-to-1. It’s no secret that banks and other types of financial institutions hold all the money, so it should be no surprise that's where cybercriminals focused their malicious activities last year, according to Group IB’s Digital Risk Trends 2023 report.

Researchers at McAfee warn that attackers are increasingly utilizing PDF attachments in email phishing campaigns. “Over the last four months, McAfee Labs has observed a rising trend in the utilization of PDF documents for conducting a succession of phishing campaigns,” the researchers write. “These PDFs were delivered as email attachments. Attackers favor using PDFs for phishing due to the file format’s widespread trustworthiness.".