Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

QR Codes, the square images that contain coded information that can be scanned by a smartphone, are becoming increasingly popular. With the number of smartphone users reaching 6.92 billion this year, access to the information within these ingenious images is within reach by around 86% of the world’s population. Since most, if not all, of the smartphones today feature QR scanners and for those that don’t come so equipped, free apps can be downloaded to add this functionality.

Researchers at Trustwave have published a report outlining trends in business email compromise (BEC) attacks, finding that these attacks spiked in February of 2023. “For the first quarter of the year, we saw a 25% increase in unique attacks compared to the last quarter of 2022,” the researchers write. “February accounted for the highest volume of BEC emails in the first half of the year. January is the second most active month for BEC.

As the world shifted into remote work and distant learning during the pandemic lockdown, e-commerce accelerated as more consumers turned to online shopping apps and websites. Customers who shop online are familiar with email confirmation for their orders. But what if you receive an email confirmation for something that you never bought? It might be a fake order scam, and they are now being sent through Google Groups.

If you’re not particular techy these acronyms may not mean much, but you can easily make checks, even if you can’t implement the fix! Read on….. One of KEEPs consultants recently assessed a client (CNI) where only 55% of their domains had the necessary SPF and DMARC configurations in place correctly. This mis-configuration allows attackers (at minimum) to easily email spoof and target your users. If you do nothing else this week, check the basics!

There’s a sentiment that has, unfortunately, taken hold in the field of cybersecurity: Users are the weakest part of your environment. You can see why some may try to paint that picture. The statistics would seem to back it up: However, there’s a deeper truth hiding behind these statistics: It’s not the employees who are the weakest part of your security environment, it’s the training they receive.

Business Email Compromise (BEC) remains a lucrative threat vector for attackers. The FBI’s IC3 reported that in 2022, they received 21,832 complaints with adjusted losses of over $2.7 billion. When it comes to targeted attacks, threat actor sophistication is evident in their ever-evolving tactics, even as detection capabilities and preventative measures improve. Let’s take a look at the current BEC landscape for the first half of 2023.

Users of the language learning app Duolingo should be wary of targeted phishing attacks following a recent data leak, according to Anthony Spadafora at Tom’s Guide. Criminals scraped the names and email addresses of 2.6 million Duolingo users earlier this year, and are now selling the entire dataset on underground forums for approximately $2.13.

Monitoring of traffic to phishing pages hosted on the free hosting service Cloudflare R2 show an unheard of spike of 6100%, many going undetected by many security solutions due to the evasive techniques used. I can’t remember a time when I’ve covered a story and the reported increases were as large as the recent spike in malicious network traffic observed by Netskope.

After you come to grips with the massive average cost of a data breach to an enterprise organization measured in the millions, it’s time to look at the factors that increase – and lower – that cost. According to IBM’s recently-released 18th edition of their Cost of a Data Breach Report, we find that this year’s average cost is $4.45 million. That’s a staggering number, but what about the contributing factors?

Phishing attacks are on the rise in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reports. “The latest figures reveal phishing is a practice that is only becoming more and more widespread,” the ABC says.“Phishing was the most reported scam to Scamwatch in 2022, with the government website recording 74,573 complaints — a 4.6 per cent increase on the previous year.