To celebrate National Computer Security Day, which is recognized on November 30 every year, KnowBe4 encourages all IT and security professionals to train their workforce how to stay safe from cybersecurity threats as the organization’s last line of defense. It is also crucial to focus on building a strong security culture by educating employees about today’s cyber threat landscape and how they can play a role in protecting the organization.

Researchers at Sophos have found that the criminal market for malicious generative AI tools is still disorganized and contentious. While there are obvious ways to abuse generative AI, such as crafting phishing emails or writing malware, criminal versions of these tools are still unreliable. The researchers found numerous malicious generative AI tools on the market, including WormGPT, FraudGPT, XXXGPT, Evil-GPT, WolfGPT, BlackHatGPT, DarkGPT, HackBot, PentesterGPT, PrivateGPT.

There’s been a “precipitous rise” in QR code phishing campaigns in 2023, according to Matthew Tyson at CSO. “For the attacker, QR codes bring a number of benefits, including some appreciated by legitimate businesses: they are easy to create and easy to use,” Tyson writes.

This is a cautionary tale of both how your data can legally end up in the hands of an organization you never intended and how victims can be largely left in the dark post-breach. Normally when there’s a press release from an organization hit by a data breach, there are at least a few details that let customers know the company has a handle on what transpired, that the breach has been mitigated, and what customers impacted should do to protect themselves.

The digital landscape is evolving at an exponential rate, and with it, the cybersecurity challenges we face. As we approach 2024, I've reflected on the insights gleaned from recent discussions I was privileged to partake in, such as the World Economic Forum's annual cybersecurity conference, ThreatCon and conversations with industry leaders, academics, and government representatives. Here are my top seven takeaways for 2024.

With organizations heavily focusing on protecting the corporate endpoint, cybercriminals are switching focus onto mobile devices where users are more prone to fall for their social engineering tactics. We consume so much content from people you don’t personally know that it’s not part of your everyday process to stop and be critical of what’s being presented to you. And that’s exactly what cybercriminals are taking advantage of.

Huntress has released a report finding that business email compromise (BEC) attacks have risen in the third quarter of 2023. “64% of identity-focused incidents in Q3 2023 involved malicious forwarding or other malicious inbox rules, a key indicator of business email compromise (BEC),” the researchers write. “Another 24% of identity-focused incidents involved logins from unusual or suspicious locations.

New data sheds light on just how active the Initial Access Broker (IAB) business is, and the growth uncovered doesn’t bode well for potential victim organizations. There’s plenty of fodder in tech news about the use of IABs and their role in cyber attacks. But rarely do we get to see a more comprehensive analysis of just how much growth in both the number of brokers and posts of credentials for sale.

Visa Payment Fraud Disruption (PFD) expects phishing attacks to increase between November 2023 and January 2024. Findings in its Holiday Edition Threats Report outline the popular fraud tactics predicted this holiday season. Expected Holiday Phishing Scams.

Another day, another warning about holiday scams! Lookout Inc., a data-centric cloud security company, is warning employees and businesses that phishing attacks are expected to more than double this week, based on historical data. With more corporate data residing in the cloud and a massive amount of employees still working remotely, mobile has become the endpoint of choice for the modern workforce.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI have released a joint Cybersecurity Advisory describing the Scattered Spider cybercriminal gang’s activities. The group, believed to be unusual both for the relative youth of its members and their native proficiency in English, was responsible for this summer’s compromises of MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment. It also excels at social engineering.

If increases in cyberattacks this year are any indication of what to expect in the next six weeks of holiday shopping, we should expect a massive uptick in holiday-related scams. The expectation by the National Retail Foundation for this year’s holiday shopping is that we will see 4% more spending than last year. This is a slight year over year decrease (as last year saw a 5.4% increase over 2021), but still indicates increases in spending.

The massive uptick in QR Code phishing is an indicator that scammers are seeing success in taking victims from the initial attack medium to one under the attacker’s control. It’s usually bad when we compare one month or quarter to another and see an increase. But when it’s a single month compared to more than half a year, you know it’s REALLY bad. And that’s what we find in security vendor ReliaQuest’s latest blog covering how Quishing is being used.

Social engineering remains one of the top attack vectors that cybercriminals use to execute malicious acts. KnowBe4’s security awareness training and simulated phishing platform allows workforces to make smarter decisions, strengthen an organization’s security culture and human risk by protecting their organization from phishing, social engineering and ransomware.

Man Bites Dog: In an unusual twist in cybercrime, the ransomware group BlackCat/ALPHV is manipulating the SEC's new 4-day rule on cyber incident reporting to increase pressure on their victims. This latest maneuver highlights a sophisticated understanding of regulatory impacts in ransomware strategies.

New findings show that the overwhelming majority of people have to sort through scam messages and texts. According to McAfee’s Global Scam Message Study, more than 80% of Americans say it’s more difficult than ever to spot a text, email or social media message that’s a scam. The proliferation of such messages sent via email and SMS is giving the average person a real sense that even they could become a victim if they’re not careful.

Researchers at Pindrop have published a report looking at consumer interactions with AI-generated deepfakes and voice clones. “Consumers are most likely to encounter deepfakes and voice clones on social media,” the researchers write. “The top four responses for both categories were YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. You will note the bias toward video on these platforms as YouTube and TikTok encounters were materially higher.

In this blog, we'll take a look at the well-known Sunburst attack of 2018 and how the specific charges stemming from this attack will impact Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) moving forward. As a CISO, it’s my job to ensure that KnowBe4's information systems and data, including our customer’s data, remain protected from any and all cyber attacks. The state of any organization’s cybersecurity rests with the CISO (if they have one).

In a recent official advisory, the FBI warned about the threat of callback phishing (among other threats). Below is the relevant excerpt. If you are not familiar with callback phishing, it is usually a phishing email that arrives into a user’s email inbox, containing some sort of usual phishing message requiring the user’s urgent response. But unlike traditional email phishing, it does not contain a URL linked to a malicious site or content.

KnowBe4 is proud to be recognized by TrustRadius for our Security Awareness Training and PhishER platforms in three categories for Best Value for Price, Best Relationship and Best Feature Set. The Best of Awards highlight products providing customers with outstanding ROI, customer satisfaction, performance, reviews, and more. To win a Best of Award, each organization had to receive 10 TrustRadius reviews between January 1 and September 30, 2023.

As ransom payments reach an all-time high, it’s time to look at attacks from a data perspective and find the greatest opportunities to stop these attacks. Every quarter, I’ve been covering the Quarterly Ransomware Reports from ransomware response company Coveware. In their latest report covering Q3 of this year, we get a greater sense of what trends their security researchers are seeing from the data: This last one is interesting.

A phishing campaign is exploiting a large number of.top domains, according to researchers from WhoisXML API. In an article for CircleID, the researchers analyzed a phishing operation first uncovered by security researcher Dancho Danchev. “Our DNS deep dive into the phishing campaign led to the discovery of 5,245 unreported potentially connected threat artifacts, a majority of which were.top domains,” the researchers write.

The fight against cyber threats remains a top priority for all organizations, including phishing attacks. SlashNext just released its much-anticipated annual "State of Phishing Report for 2023." This report sheds light on the alarming surge in phishing threats across email, web, and mobile channels. We will delve into the key findings and insights from the report, highlighting the growing influence of generative AI tools in cybercriminal activities. The Phishing Landscape: A Disturbing Uptick.

Spear phishing was the most common attack technique in the third quarter of 2023, according to researchers at ReliaQuest. “In Q2 2023, spear phishing-related techniques represented the three most observed methods of attack,” the researchers write. “This remained true in Q3 2023, accounting for a total of almost 65% of all true-positive incidents.

An analysis of ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations from 2016 through October of 2023 shows the healthcare sector is likely to continue to suffer as a viable ransomware target. In the last seven years, there have been 539 confirmed ransomware attacks on U.S. hospitals, costing a total of around $77 billion. Consumer tech comparison website Comparitech performed an analysis of these attacks to show the trends – with both positive and negative results.

In an analysis of web pages identified as admin portals, some incredibly weak passwords were identified – and some of them are going to really surprise you. We all know the general drill with admin passwords – make them complex and long. Simple right? But a new analysis of admin passwords shows that IT admins seem to not be vigilant around good password hygiene.

The never-ending deluge of phishing emails, malware and ransomware threats can leave incident response and security operation teams (SOC) looking for faster ways to analyze user-reported malicious emails without risking their environments. Manually-triaging every email and being forced to switch between security applications/interfaces only slows response times, increases the chances for human error and means valuable threat intel can be missed.

As large organizations realize the likelihood of cyber attacks and improve their cyber readiness, small businesses are seeing increases not experienced by their larger counterparts. If I was to tell you that cyber attacks typically focus on larger businesses, you’d likely agree. After all, it just makes sense that the smaller the business, the likelihood that a cybercriminal’s earnings would be smaller. But, according to U.K.

Cybersecurity experts expect to see threat actors increasingly make use of AI tools to craft convincing social engineering attacks, according to Eric Geller at the Messenger. “One of AI’s biggest advantages is that it can write complete and coherent English sentences,” Geller writes. “Most hackers aren’t native English speakers, so their messages often contain awkward phrasing, grammatical errors and strange punctuation.