Ever heard of pretexting? And no, we’re not talking about when you first carefully draft a risky text message before sending it! Pretexting is a sneaky and highly effective form of social engineering that attackers use to dupe people into sharing their personal information.

In our companion blog post, Vedere Labs analyzed the main ransomware trends we observed in the first half of 2022, including state-sponsored ransomware, new mainstream targets and evolving extortion techniques. Ransomware is the main threat targeting most organizations nowadays. However, three other notable cyberthreat trends also evolved during this period: Below we analyze each of these trends in more detail.

Organizations must implement effective account protection measures or put themselves at heightened risk of data breaches and other serious cyber attacks, such as ransomware injections. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a crucial component of any organization’s cybersecurity program. MFA adds an additional layer of security, helping prevent hackers from gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Hackers are getting smarter, and phishing is becoming more sophisticated. Most employees know that when an email comes in from a random address, rife with misspellings, and credentials or other private data demands, it’s absolutely a phishing scam. But what if, as an employee, you got a text to update your Okta credentials? What if the link took you to a domain that looked just like your Okta login?

Read also: Microsoft disrupts a phishing operation targeting NATO countries, the use of wiper malware expands beyond Ukraine, and more.

According to Gartner, 20 percent of organizations have experienced at least one attack on IoT tech in the past three years. Unsecured network connections with Internet access compromise data privacy. Through them, third parties can gain remote control over the device.

The only constant you can count on in technology is change. From microprocessors to PCs to smartphones to software, technology continues to become faster, smarter, and more sophisticated. But make no mistake: what’s changed the most in the world of technology over the past few decades is the hacker. Hackers are highly motivated to stay ahead of the latest security trends. It’s how they keep from getting caught, and how they keep the fun and profit rolling.

Creating and running an application in your favorite language is usually pretty simple. After you create your application, deploying it and showing it to the world is also quite straightforward. The last thing you need is someone to take over your system and fully control your brand new application. In this article, I’ll explain how this can happen with a reverse shell attack. Note that the code examples in this article are for educational purposes only.