Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Once upon a time, security awareness training resembled a never-ending game of Tetris. Threats cascaded down, demanding swift action and strategy, only to speed up until we inevitably faltered. Today, we've entered a new realm of engagement, creativity, and community in human risk management.

Netcraft warns that scammers are posting QR code stickers on parking meters in the UK and other European countries. In the UK, the QR codes lead to phishing sites that impersonate the parking payment app PayByPhone. The phishing sites are designed to steal personal information and payment data.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing most, if not all, industries worldwide. AI systems use complex algorithms and large datasets to analyze information, make predictions and adjust to new scenarios through machine learning – enabling them to improve over time without being explicitly programmed for every task.

A phishing campaign is targeting GitHub users with phony CAPTCHA pages, according to researchers at McAfee. The phishing emails ask users to address a security vulnerability in a GitHub repository that they recently contributed to, and contain a link to find more information about the alleged vulnerability. This link leads to a fake CAPTCHA page that attempts to trick them into installing malware.

Analysis of typosquatting and brand impersonation activity across 500 of the most visited domains provides insight in to how these techniques come together to effectively deceive. From February 2024 to July 2024, Zscaler’s ThreatLabz tracked more than 30,000 lookalike domains that impersonated some of the world’s most well-known brands.

Since the beginning of computers, social engineering has been the number one way that computers and networks have been compromised. Social engineering is involved in 70% to 90% of all successful data breaches. Nothing else is even close (unpatched software and firmware are involved in 33% of successful attacks, everything else is 1% or less).

New analysis of attacks on the financial sector shows that the combination of phishing emails and compromised credentials is a recurring — and financially impactful — threat. According to IBM, financial services is the second most expensive sector with an average cost of a data breach at $6.1 million.

Researchers at Barracuda have observed an increase in phishing attacks that abuse popular content creation and collaboration platforms. These include online graphic design platforms and document-sharing services widely used by educational institutions and businesses. “The analysts found that attackers are sending out emails from these platforms, featuring legitimate-looking posts, designs, and documents, but with embedded phishing links,” the researchers write.

New analysis of blockchain activity shows scammers are needing less time to obtain crypto payments and are seeing higher payoffs per scam. I continue to repeatedly cover breakdowns of cybercrime activity from the folks at Chainalysis because it represents an unbiased view that some security vendors may inherently have (because their data is based on what their solutions do and don’t discover).

Analyst reports aim to provide market insights. But when it comes to Human Risk Management (HRM), we’ve noticed that they often fall short of capturing the full picture. You already know that we are the undisputed leader in the essential areas that have been standard features in the security awareness market for years. Those capabilities are why we’ve become the largest vendor in the space. But for years now we have exceeded just those standard features.