Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

These days, we use Gmail for everything from customer service to telehealth. Over time, your Gmail account might become a treasure trove of sensitive PII, PCI, PHI, and passwords that hackers can leverage. In fact, as of this year, just under half of all data breaches involve email. So, what can you do to protect your inbox? Enter: email encryption.

Read also: A former cop gets 20 months in prison for selling victims’ personal data, a BEC scammer sentenced, and more.

Phishing remains a top initial access vector for threat actors, according to researchers at ReliaQuest. Phishing and other social engineering tactics can bypass security technologies by targeting humans directly. “The enduring dominance of phishing as an initial access technique underscores its effectiveness and persistence in the face of cybersecurity advancements and more sophisticated methodologies,” the researchers write.

You can spot a phishing website by checking the URL, looking at the website’s content, reading reviews of the website and using a password manager that can verify the legitimacy of websites. Continue reading to learn what phishing websites are, how to identify them and how to avoid landing on them.

Trustwave SpiderLabs is prepped to launch its newest threat intelligence research, the 2024 Trustwave Risk Radar Report: Financial Services Sector. The upcoming report, which is set to be released on September 10, promises to be an indispensable resource for cybersecurity professionals. This comprehensive report not only sheds light on the modus operandi of a dominant ransomware gang but also delves into the persistent use of phishing and brute-force attacks to compromise credentials.

Researchers at Netskope last month observed a 2000-fold increase in traffic to phishing pages delivered through Microsoft Sway. The phishing attacks are targeting organizations in the technology, manufacturing, and finance sectors in Asia and North America. Most of these attacks involved QR code phishing (quishing) to trick victims into visiting the malicious sites.

Threat actors are increasingly tailoring their attacks to target social media apps and smartphone users, according to a new report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). As email security technologies improve, scammers are turning to social media apps, text messages, and voice calls to conduct social engineering attacks.

New analysis of Q2 threats shows a consistent pattern of behavior on the part of threat actors and threat groups, providing organizations with a clear path to protect themselves. It’s every cybersecurity professionals’ worry; whether the security controls they’ve put in place will actually stop attacks.

In July 2024, Netskope Threat Labs tracked a 2,000-fold increase in traffic to phishing pages delivered through Microsoft Sway. The majority of the credential grabbing pages investigated used “Quishing,” a form of phishing that uses QR code to trick users into accessing a malicious website. The phishing campaigns targeted MS Office credentials, using documents to bait users into logging in.

Phishing is an email-borne malicious technique aimed at learning the sensitive credentials of users or spreading malware. This practice has been on the list of the top cyber threats to individuals and businesses for years. According to the latest Phishing Activity Trends Report by APWG, the total number of phishing attacks identified in Q1 2024 exceeded 963,000.