The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued an urgent warning about a surge in immigration scams targeting immigrants and their families on social media platforms like Facebook. Scammers are impersonating attorneys and law firms, promising immigration services such as work permits, green cards, or even citizenship.

KnowBe4 is a big believer in focusing on decreasing human risk as the best way to decrease cybersecurity risk in most environments. A big part of decreasing human risk is using effective security awareness training (SAT). You do not want to just focus on SAT, but SAT is a big part of decreasing human risk. To be sure, your human risk management projects need to be broadly focused on more than SAT. We agree.

Trend Micro warns that the Russian state-sponsored threat actor Earth Koshchei (also known as “APT29” or “Cozy Bear”) is using spear phishing emails to trick victims into connecting to rogue Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) relays. “Earth Koshchei’s rogue RDP campaign reached its peak on October 22, when spear-phishing emails were sent to governments and armed forces, think tanks, academic researchers, and Ukrainian targets,” Trend Micro explains.

There is a type of scam where victims are contacted by someone fraudulently posing as a popular trusted entity (e.g., Amazon, U.S. Post Office, etc.), law enforcement, or an intelligence agency that initially claims to have evidence linking the victim to a global, spy-like scam. Initially, the victim is befuddled, clueless and scared. The caller then asks the victim to hold on as they are then passed to one or more purported national law enforcement agencies.

A threat actor is abusing HubSpot’s Free Form Builder service to craft credential-harvesting phishing pages, according to Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42. The campaign has targeted at least 20,000 users at European companies in the automotive, chemical, and industrial compound manufacturing sectors. The attacks are designed to steal credentials in order to compromise victims’ Microsoft Azure cloud services.

ESET has published its threat report for the second half of 2024, outlining a new social engineering tactic targeting mobile banking users. Threat actors are using Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and WebAPKs to bypass mobile security measures, since these files don’t require users to grant permissions to install apps from unknown sources. “The initial phishing messages were delivered through various methods, including SMS, automated voice calls, and social media malvertising,” ESET says.

An email phishing campaign is targeting popular YouTube creators with phony collaboration offers, according to researchers at CloudSEK. The emails contain OneDrive links designed to trick users into installing malware. “The malware is hidden within attachments such as Word documents, PDFs, or Excel files, often masquerading as promotional materials, contracts, or business proposals,” the researchers explain.

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about a new breed of investment scam that combines AI-powered video testimonials, social media malvertising, and phishing tactics to steal money and personal data. Known as Nomani — a play on "no money" — this scam grew by over 335% in H2 2024, with more than 100 new URLs detected daily between May and November, according to ESET's H2 2024 Threat Report.

Ransomware attacks targeting utilities have surged by 42% over the past year, with spear phishing playing a major role in 81% of cases, according to a ReliaQuest study spanning November 2023 to October 2024. Analyzing data from its GreyMatter platform and dark web activity, ReliaQuest found that utilities like water and energy systems are disproportionately affected. Their critical role in infrastructure makes them prime targets for cybercriminals.

Threat actors are using voice phishing (vishing) attacks via Microsoft Teams in an attempt to trick victims into installing the DarkGate malware, according to researchers at Trend Micro. “The attacker used social engineering to manipulate the victim to gain access and control over a computer system,” Trend Micro says.

A widespread phishing campaign is attempting to steal credentials from employees working at dozens of organizations around the world, according to researchers at Group-IB. The campaign has targeted organizations across twelve industries, including government, aerospace, finance, energy, telecommunications, and fashion. “The campaign begins with phishing links crafted to mimic trusted platforms commonly used for document management and electronic signatures, such as DocuSign,” Group-IB says.

A new report makes it clear that U.K. organizations need to do more security awareness training to ensure their employees don’t fall victim to the evolving use of AI. Here at KnowBe4, we’ve long known that AI is going to be a growing problem, with phishing attacks and the social engineering they employ far more believable and effective.

For decades, we have all been warned to be appropriately skeptical of internet search engine results. Sadly, most people are not. Most people think that what Google, Bing, or Duck Duck Go brings back is heaven sent and can be trusted. It cannot. Results often include malicious links from search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning, where the attacker has been able to trick the search engine into returning its URL when a user searches for something.

A new report from Hornetsecurity has found that 427.8 million emails received by businesses in 2024 contained malicious content. “Once again, phishing remains the most prevalent form of attack, responsible for a third of all cyber-attacks in 2024,” Hornetsecurity’s researchers write. “This was confirmed by the analysis of 55.6 billion emails, showing that Phishing remains a top concern consistently year over year.

Researchers at Silent Push warn that a phishing campaign is using malicious Google Ads to conduct payroll redirect scams. The attackers are buying search ads with brand keywords to boost their phishing pages to the top of the search results. “We have identified hundreds of domains primarily focused on Workday users and high-profile organizations, including the California Employment Development Department (EDD), Kaiser Permanente, Macy’s, New York Life, and Roche,” the researchers write.

New analysis of ransomware attacks shows that phishing is the primary delivery method and organizations need to offer more effective security awareness training to mitigate the threat. Hornet Security’s Q3 2024 Ransomware Attacks Survey report paints a pretty bleak picture of how organizations have fared this year against ransomware attacks. So almost one in five organizations is a victim. According to the survey data, 52.3% of the attacks started with a phishing email.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warns that threat actors are increasingly using generative AI to increase the persuasiveness of social engineering attacks. Criminals are using these tools to generate convincing text, images, and voice audio to impersonate individuals and companies. “Generative AI reduces the time and effort criminals must expend to deceive their targets,” the FBI says.

Frequently, when a cybersecurity training manager sends out a controversial simulated phishing attack message that angers a bunch of employees and ends up making headlines, we get called by the media to comment on the story. Here are some examples of potentially controversial simulated phishing messages: I have read many stories of security awareness training managers sending simulated phishing emails with these types of messages, often around Christmas or other national holidays.

In recent years, the world of cybersecurity has witnessed a concerning trend: a significant increase in phishing attacks. A new study reveals that these attacks have surged by nearly 40% in the year ending August, 2024. What's particularly alarming is the role played by new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) in this spike. While gTLDs like.shop, .top, and.xyz make up only 11% of new domain registrations, they account for a staggering 37% of reported cybercrime domains.

The latest data on brand phishing trends shows one brand dominating quarter over quarter, but also continuing to take on a larger share of the brand impersonation. Take a guess which brand tops the list as the most impersonated in phishing attacks? If you guessed Microsoft, you’d be right. You’d also have been right last quarter, and the quarter before that – according to Check Point Research.

Scammers are abusing Google ads to target users searching for help with printer problems, according to researchers at Malwarebytes. The malicious ads claim to offer tech support for installing drivers used by HP and Canon printers. “After clicking on a malicious ad, the website instructs you to enter your printer’s model number in order to download the required driver, which it proceeds to ‘install,’” the researchers write.