Malign persuasion can take many forms. We tend to hear the most about phishing (malicious emails) or smishing (malicious texts). Other threats are also worth some attention, like the risk of drive-by attacks. One current drive-by campaign is being run by the operators of BatLoader, a malware strain that establishes initial entry and persistence, and then can be used to distribute a range of other malicious code that loots affected systems and networks of valuable data, including funds.

With attackers knowing financial fraud-based phishing attacks are best suited for the one industry where the money is, this massive spike in attacks should both surprise you and not surprise you at all. When you want tires, where do you go? Right – to the tire store. Shoes? Yup – shoe store. The most money you can scam from a single attack?

Microsoft has observed a thirty-eight percent increase in cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) offerings for launching business email compromise (BEC) attacks between 2019 and 2022. “Cybercriminal activity around business email compromise is accelerating,” the company said in a report. “Microsoft observes a significant trend in attackers’ use of platforms like BulletProftLink, a popular service for creating industrial-scale malicious email campaigns.

The Insider reported that an apparently AI-generated photo faking an explosion near the Pentagon in D.C. went viral. The Arlington Police Department confirmed that the image and accompanying reports were fake. But when the news was shared by a reputable Twitter account on Monday, the market briefly dipped. The photo was spread by dozens of accounts on social media, including RT, a Russian state-media Twitter account with more than 3 million followers — but the post has since been deleted.

As you all know, KnowBe4 frequently promotes security awareness training and we also mention that unpatched software is a distant number two issue after social engineering. We generally say that unpatched software is involved in 20%-40% of successful exploits. It's been hard though to get good figures on that for years and even CISA has not published hard numbers, even though they appear to focus on it.

Food for thought as discussed on May 18, 2023, an article posted in The Australian Insurance Council: Banning paying a ransom to cyber hackers is counter-productive where Andrew Hall, the Chief Executive of the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA), stated that “attempts to ban businesses from paying ransoms for cyber attacks risks eroding trust and relationships with government.”

Google has recently introduced a set of new top-level domains: .dad, .esq, .prof, .phd, .nexus, .foo, .zip and.mov. They’re now available for purchase, and it’s the last two that are attracting attention due to the risk of abuse in phishing attacks. WIRED describes why.zip and.mov have raised concerns. “The two stand out because they are also common file extension names. The former, .zip, is ubiquitous for data compression, while.mov is a video format developed by Apple.

One of KnowBe4's long-term employees just send me a picture this morning of a postcard that sure looks like it's phishing, the good old-fashioned way: snail mail! Here is the picture and you tell me what all the red flags are! The domain does not work of course. The email seems to have disappeared into the bitbucket. For many obvious reasons i have not tried the QR code since I do not have a bulletproof sandbox installed on my smartphone where I can detonate malware. :-D.

For all the recent focus on artificial intelligence and its potential for deepfake impostures, the boiler room is still very much active in the criminal underworld. WIRED describes the ways in which people in many parts of the world (Ireland, France, Nigeria, and Mexico) have been recruited to work as freelancers for a company that seeks to profit from lonely people looking for love. This is how a typical operation runs.

A new report covering 13 global markets highlights phishing prevalence and its role in cyber attacks when compared to other types of attacks. It’s difficult for me not to stand on my “phishing is a problem” soapbox when there exists stories and reports demonstrating that phishing continues to dominate as a security problem that isn’t being properly addressed.