Phishing is a familiar criminal tactic. It’s also used by intelligence services for cyber espionage campaigns. On Friday, April 28th, 2023, CERT-UA, Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team, reported that Russian operators are sending phishing emails that misrepresent themselves as sending instructions on installing a Windows security update.
Since the beginning, two types of computer attacks (known as initial root cause exploits) have composed the vast majority of successful attacks: social engineering and exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities. These two root causes account for somewhere between 50% to 90% of all successful attacks.
Compromised websites (legitimate sites that have been successfully compromised to support social engineering) are serving visitors fake Google Chrome update error messages. “Google Chrome users who use the browser regularly should be wary of a new attack campaign that distributes malware by posing as a Google Chrome update error message,” Trend Micro warns. “The attack campaign has been operational since February 2023 and has a large impact area.”
Security teams face unique challenges in today’s rapidly-changing landscape of phishing, malware, and other social engineering and cybersecurity threats. Collaboration across disparate teams and siloed tools adds additional layers of complexity to security teams’ day-to-day operations. When security teams use different systems for simulated phishing, security awareness training, incident response and remediation, it is difficult to track and optimize the full lifecycle of an incident.
New data provides a multi-faceted look at the changing face of phishing attacks. This data includes who’s being targeted, the tactics being used, and why phishing attacks continue to work. If 2022 is any indication of what the remainder of this year will hold for organizations fending off cyber attacks, cybersecurity efforts are going to need a whole lot more emphasis.
It was all over the news. Fed's Jerome Powell was social engineered by Russian pranksters posing as Zelensky. According to video footage shown on Russian state television, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell unwittingly spoke with a duo of Russian pranksters who were pretending to be Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during a call. Powell provided responses to various questions about topics like inflation and the Russian central bank, believing that he was speaking with Zelenskiy.
Wired just published an interesting story about political bias that can show up in LLM's due to their training. It is becoming clear that training an LLM to exhibit a certain bias is relatively easy. This is a reason for concern, because this can "reinforce entire ideologies, worldviews, truths and untruths” which is what OpenAI has been warning about.
New data shows how poorly organizations are at identifying – let alone removing – an attacker's foothold, putting themselves at continued risk of further attacks and data breaches. We’d like to think our security stance includes some really great abilities to detect, investigate, detect, and remediate an attack.
A new survey points to an overconfidence around organization’s preparedness, despite admitting to falling victim to ransomware attacks – in some cases multiple times. According to Fortinet’s 2023 Global Ransomware Report, the threat of ransomware at face value seems to be of high importance to organizations: But the data also shows that despite the focus on protecting against attacks and believing they are ready, organizations still fell victim.
Poker players and other human lie detectors look for “tells,” that is, a sign by which someone might unwittingly or involuntarily reveal what they know, or what they intend to do. A cardplayer yawns when he’s about to bluff, for example, or someone’s pupils dilate when they’ve successfully drawn to an insider straight.
