Check out this one line for a moment...“duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations.” In a worrying display of social engineering sophistication, a multinational company was defrauded of $25 million through an intricately planned deepfake scam.

A new scam relies on a victim's sense of curiosity, brand impersonation, and the hopes of a new login to compromise Facebook credentials. We’ve all seen one of those posts on social media about some actor, musician or famous person that has passed away. Feeling a sense of sadness and wanting to know more details, these posts garner a lot of attention.

A phishing-as-a-service platform called “Greatness” is facilitating phishing attacks against Microsoft 365 accounts, according to researchers at Sucuri. “Greatness operates as a Phishing as a Service (PhaaS) platform, providing a number of features and components for bad actors to conduct their phishing attacks against Microsoft 365 accounts,” the researchers write. “URLScan results show thousands of affected pages related to this kit.

Analysis of 2023 attacks shows how the financial services industry had a very bad year, with increases in both vendor email compromise (VEC) and business email compromise (BEC) attacks, targeting millions of dollars using very specific methods. There’s no industry that has more money than the one dealing in it. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that attacks on the financial services industry continue at an increasing rate.

New data from cyber insurance underwriters shows what they think the biggest threats will be in 2024 and what organizations should do about it. Because insurance underwriters analyse lots of risk data to make decisions about insurance premiums and policies, it makes sense to hear their perspective on 2024’s outlook will be. According to insurer Woodruff Sawyer’s Cyber Looking Ahead Guide 2024, there’s some good news and some bad news.

Attackers are abusing Microsoft Teams to send phishing messages, according to researchers at AT&T Cybersecurity. “While most end users are well-acquainted with the dangers of traditional phishing attacks, such as those delivered via email or other media, a large proportion are likely unaware that Microsoft Teams chats could be a phishing vector,” the researchers write.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued an alert warning that scammers are tricking victims into converting their savings into cash or precious metals, then sending couriers to pick up the items for safekeeping. The scammers then steal the goods and cut contact with the victims. The FBI says victims lost more than $55 million to these scams between May and December 2023.

New data for Q4 of 2023 reveals a sizable shift in the cyber threat landscape, with serious implications regarding ransomware and social engineering attacks targeting both the largest and smallest organizations worldwide. The good news is that ransoms continue to decline – according to the most recent Quarterly Ransomware Report from ransomware response vendor Coveware.

Check Point’s review of ransomware shows that the percent of organizations worldwide hit by this greatest of cyberthreats rose by a whopping 33% in 2023. In 2022, 1 in 13 organizations globally had been the victim of a ransomware attack. According to the latest Check Point Research, that ratio worsened to just 1 in 10 in 2023. That represents 60,000 attempted attacks per organization throughout the year.

Phishing attacks are increasingly using open redirects to evade detection by security filters, according to researchers at Trustwave. Open redirects are URLs hosted on trusted domains that take users to separate, potentially malicious domains. The researchers explain the process using the example URL “hxxps://goodsitecom.” Trustwave has observed a “significant rise” in phishing attacks using open redirects over the past several months.