Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Grooming is a method of establishing a connection with a person to perpetrate a crime against them. Grooming is becoming more common in fraud, both online as well as in interpersonal interactions. What’s more, scammers are getting more sophisticated in their techniques. There is a mistaken belief that scammers are forceful, arrogant, and therefore easy to spot, but many play a long game, carefully and patiently grooming the victim before asking for money.

These days, when I cautiously venture to my favourite shopping mall on a weekend, I notice how different it is from a year-and-a-half ago, when no one had ever heard of COVID-19. It is busy, but not nearly as busy as it was back then. Sadly, I can rarely find my shoe size as merchandise stocks are low due to COVID-related supply chain issues.

Vancouver, Canada – September 14th, 2021 – INETCO Systems Limited, a leader in real-time payment fraud prevention, is pleased to announce the launch of INETCO BullzAI, which combines a web application firewall with a real-time payment fraud detection and blocking system in one elegant solution.

A long time ago (in the early 2000s), I was playing games online. One of my accounts was compromised – the password was changed, and multiple “high-priced” items I had earned were “traded” without my knowledge, to the account of another player. One could easily blame my simple password at that time when there were no rules around password strength. Regardless of the reason, what happened was one of the earliest versions of an account takeover (ATO) attack.

This post is about LinkedIn – a go-to professional networking and jobs platform – a feature that allows outside individuals (not belonging to the target organisation) to post jobs on an organisation’s behalf. Whether you call it posting scam jobs on LinkedIn, phishing the LinkedIn users or any wider campaigns based on the drivers – it is a recipe for Identity fraud.

Every day, billions of emails are sent out, some legitimate, while others are used to target unsuspecting users. According to the FBI, phishing attacks were the most common type of cybercrime in 2020. The reason these are so commonly used is because phishing tools are easy to get a hold of and attackers are taking advantage of the weakest link when it comes to security – the employees.

In an age when attackers create over a million phishing sites each month, and phishing serves as a beachhead for 95 percent of all attacks against enterprise networks, how can businesses respond? Part of the answer lies in educating users to recognize and report phishing, of course. But user education only goes so far – particularly because the same statistics cited above show that, on average, only 3 percent of users will report phishing emails.

Social media platforms are excellent hunting grounds for scammers. This is where we connect with our friends or people who we have something in common with. This is precisely what scammers exploit—our connections and the trust that is afforded between friends or acquaintances. From an early age, we are taught to be kind and compassionate as well as to help others, especially people we know such as friends and family. In turn, they will help us if we ever need it.

Imagine, it’s a Saturday morning and you receive a call from a bank: – Hello? – Hi [insert your name], we suspect that a fraudster is trying to use your card at a grocery store in Texas. – Well, I am at a grocery store in Texas! – Oh my gosh! Do you see him? If only credit card fraud was funny.