Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Recently, I covered a T-Mobile scam where a friend of mine narrowly avoided losing money. In that scam, the attackers called up pretending to be from T-Mobile offering him a cannot-pass-up 30% discount on future T-Mobile bills. While he was initially suspicious of the unexpected callers, they gained his confidence by repeating the amounts of his last two T-Mobile bills, billing address, and knew that his wife was also on the account.

Email is still the most common attack vector for cyber threats, according to a new report from Barracuda. The researchers found that one in four emails during February 2025 was either malicious or spam. HTML attachments were the most common file type used in phishing emails. “One of the most striking findings from the report is that 23% of HTML attachments are malicious, making them the most weaponized type of text file,” Barracuda says.

A friend of mine got a call on his phone and he regrettably picked it up. The number was 267-332-3644. The area code is from Bucks County, PA, where he used to live many years ago. But since his multiple anti-scam phone filter apps did not flag the number as a scam, and it was from a place he used to live, he picked it up.

Scammers are exploiting the death of Pope Francis to launch social engineering attacks, according to researchers at Check Point. The researchers note that threat actors often take advantage of high-profile tragedies and crises to exploit victims’ emotions. “They typically begin with disinformation campaigns on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook, uploading fake images generated by AI,” the researchers write.

Ever since Microsoft’s initial announcement on February 13, 2025, about a Russian nation-state phishing campaign using "device code phishing," many people have been wondering what it is. This post will tell you what device code phishing is and how to defend against it. Here are some other related reports involving the recently reported device code phishing attacks.

A social engineering campaign is abusing Zoom's remote control feature to take control of victims’ computers and install malware, according to researchers at security firm Trail of Bits. The operation targeted Trail of Bits’ CEO, who recognized it as malicious and didn’t fall for the attack. The researchers have attributed the campaign to the ELUSIVE COMET threat actor.

Recently, I received an email at work from a company with whom I've had previous interactions. The email lacked context and contained an attachment, immediately raising suspicion. I reported it to our infosec team using the Phish Alert Button (PAB). A short while later, our team confirmed it was indeed a malicious email. Subsequently, the sender organization informed us that they had been compromised, and phishing emails had been distributed from their account.

A new report from Valimail has found that 50% of organizations lack effective protection against email spoofing. Specifically, many organizations have lenient DMARC policies that don’t actually prevent spoofing. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is an email authentication protocol that helps prevent attackers from spoofing organizations that have the protocol in place.

According to our independent survey of individuals across the UK, USA, Netherlands, France, Denmark, Sweden, the DACH region, and Africa who use a laptop as part of their work, 90.1% find simulated phishing tests relevant. What’s more, 90.7% agreed that these simulations improve their awareness of real phishing attacks.

A new report from Sophos found that ransomware attacks accounted for over 90% of incident response cases involving medium-sized businesses in 2024, as well as 70% of cases involving small businesses. “While the overall number of incidents in 2024 was slightly down—in part because of better defenses and the disruption of some major ransomware-as-a-service operators—ransomware-related crime is not fading away,” Sophos says.