I want to talk to you about Peter. He’s a new hire at your company, having joined a couple of days ago. He can just about remember the names of his teammates. The HR Manager has told him to look out for an email so that he can create an account on the company’s employee portal. As expected, he receives an email and clicks on the link provided to enter his credentials.

Hackers have gained access to the personal data of 50m T-Mobile customers. Cybercriminals are reportedly offering access to some of the data in return for a fee of 6 bitcoin, or $270,000. The cause of the breach is unclear, but this follows a string of breaches for T-Mobile in recent years, after an incident in December 2020 that leaked the call records of around 200,000 customers.

Account takeover (ATO) is a dangerous form of business email compromise (BEC). Attackers gain access to a legitimate email account within an organisation, often by stealing credentials through spear phishing. They’ll then send emails from the compromised account with the goal of getting a fraudulent payment authorised or accessing sensitive data to exfiltrate.

The internet is an incredible tool for education. Unfortunately, not everyone uses it to better themselves or the world around them. There are plenty of opportunities to learn how to defraud, damage, and steal from organizations – so many in fact, that this open source of hacking knowledge is a new technology service industry in its own right: crime-as-a-service.