Several weeks ago, my good friend Katie Nickels (Director of Intelligence at Red Canary extraordinaire) and I were chatting about Ransomware. She was super interested and passionate about some new uses of a ransomware variant named “Ryuk” (first detected in 2018 and named after a manga/anime character) [1]. I was, to be honest, much less interested. It turns out, as usual, Katie was right; this was a big deal (although as you will see, I’m right too… still dull stuff!).

SMS phishing, or “Smishing,” is a mobile phishing attack that targets victims via the SMS messaging channel rather than through email. A natural evolution of the phishing phenomenon, smishing attacks attempt to dupe mobile users with phony text messages containing links to legitimate looking, but fraudulent, sites. These smishing sites try to steal credentials, propagate mobile malware, or perpetrate fraud.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a compliance program established by the US government that sets a baseline for cloud products and services regarding their approach to authorization, security assessment, and continuous monitoring.

SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) systems have a reputation for being expensive. And that’s generally correct – they can cost hundreds of thousands per year or have huge upfront costs. But why is that? There are several main reasons: All of this is changing. According to Gartner, SIEMs are going to the mid-market and these things don’t hold true there.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Once again the impact of this COVID pandemic claims another. Cast your minds back to earlier in the yearn (or was it last year now – feels like it) with the sudden burst in use of Zoom and House Party causing all sorts of issues.

Netskope Threat Labs is warning users to be careful of spam messages being shared via Google Docs. The spam messages come in the form of a comment on a document or presentations and are sent by [email protected]. Both the comment and the document link the user to a spam or scam website. Because the messages are sent by Google Docs, it is likely that your spam filters do not detect and block these messages. In fact, docs.google.com may be explicitly allowed by your spam filters.

Fintech companies – those that offer technology to support the banking and personal finance industry – are increasingly at risk of cyberattack. After healthcare, fintech is the second most frequently attacked industry, according to Alissa Abdullah, senior vice president of cybersecurity technology at Mastercard. Fintech News found that 27% of attacks target banks or healthcare.

Halloween is tomorrow, and do you know what that means? For starters, it means you can dance under the rare blue moon. A full moon visible for all time zones on Earth hasn’t happened since 1944, and won’t happen again until 2039. It also means you can don a costume and be anything you like. Kind of like a fraudster, that assumes a new persona every time there is a payment fraud attack.

Bad bots are disrupting your website performance, reducing performance and speed. Bot activity, both good and bad, affects all industries including retail, online gambling and gaming and streaming. In our blog we discuss the detrimental impact of bots to your website performance and subsequently, the customer experience, with advice for detecting and mitigating bad bot activity.

APIs served as part of web and mobile applications are vital to enabling customers to interact with your business. However, it’s important to understand the impact on your business when these APIs are used in new, non-standard and potentially unintended ways. While APIs are usually written and intended for use with certain frontends (i.e. web application or mobile app), they are served publicly on the internet and are open to inspection by any interested party.