Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

From February to July 2023, Netskope Threat Labs has been tracking a staggering 61-fold increase in traffic to phishing pages hosted in Cloudflare R2. The majority of the phishing campaigns target Microsoft login credentials, although there are some pages targeting Adobe, Dropbox, and other cloud apps. The attacks have been targeting victims mainly in North America and Asia, across different segments, led by the technology, financial services, and banking sectors.

We previously reported independently on PDF-based phishing attacks skyrocketing and the rise of SEO attacks. A recent research study found that the combination of both is quite common. Most worryingly, PDF-based SEO attacks are poorly detected by common defense mechanisms such as blocklists, ad blockers or even crowdsourced antivirus services VirusTotal. PDF-based attacks can be anything from a website embedded in a PDF file to an email.

A whaling attack is a type of phishing attack that targets senior executives. The act of whaling is usually perpetrated via email and involves deceiving victims into initiating actions that put the organization and its assets at risk. In this blog, we explore how a whaling attack works, why executives are targeted, examples of successful whaling attacks, and steps you can take to prevent them.

The latest data from Comcast Business’ analysis of over 23.5 billion cyber attacks on their business customers shows the importance and role of phishing in attacks. Over the years there has been a consistent mantra, where everyone agrees that “90-something” percent of cyber attacks start with phishing. There have been plenty of sources that corroborate this using percentages in the 90th percentile, but the overall message is phishing is your greatest Initial Access tactic.

In the digital realm, email communication has become the standard form of communication in our personal, work, and education. Due to the information we consistently send via email, they could easily fall into the wrong hands if left unprotected, bringing about dire consequences such as identity theft and financial losses. To avoid such nightmares, you can use a temporary email to keep your email safe from spam or an encrypted email to protect the contents of the emails you send.

At Black Hat USA 2023, a session led by a team of security researchers, including Fredrik Heiding, Bruce Schneier, Arun Vishwanath, and Jeremy Bernstein, unveiled an intriguing experiment. They tested large language models (LLMs) to see how they performed in both writing convincing phishing emails and detecting them. This is the PDF technical paper.

Read also: A Bitfinex hacker pleads guilty, over €2M seized in a major crackdown on West African crime groups, and more.

Threat actors abuse Google AMP for evasive phishing attacks, hackers exploit Salesforce’s email services in targeted Facebook phishing campaign, and Russian actor BlueCharlie alters infrastructure in response to disclosures.

On March 15th, 2023, a new feature released from Microsoft enabled organizations with a paid subscription to Microsoft 365 for business, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Enterprise Mobility Suite, or other Microsoft services, to add company branding to their Microsoft 365 sign-in page via Azure Active Directory. This update is often recommended to improve both user experience and security by providing assurance the individual is logging in via the legitimate page for their company.