Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In this blog post, we outline why phishing continues to present such a threat and outline 10 steps you can take to better defend your organisation against it.

Credential harvesting is a technique that hackers use to gain unauthorized access to legitimate credentials using a variety of strategies, tactics, and techniques such as phishing and DNS poisoning. Phishing is the most frequent type of cyber threat and can lead to more harmful attacks such as ransomware and credential harvesting. According to recent research, phishing assaults targeted credential harvesting in 71.5% of cases in 2020.

The Iranian threat actor Charming Kitten is launching sophisticated spear phishing attacks to distribute a new version of its POWERSTAR malware, according to researchers at Volexity. “In the last few years, Volexity has observed threat actors dramatically increase the level of effort they put into compromising credentials or systems of individual targets,” Volexity says.

As executables and scripts are unable to bypass security solutions as attachments, cybercriminals turn to HTML as a means of obfuscation and malicious execution. According to analysis from security vendor Avanan, executables and Office documents as malicious attachments are almost non-existent – thanks to the solid efforts on the part of security companies and Microsoft.

A year-long phishing campaign has been uncovered that impersonates 100+ popular clothing, footwear, and apparel brands using at least 10 fake domains impersonating each brand. We’ve seen plenty of attacks that impersonated a single brand along with a few domains used to ensure victims can be taken to a website that seeks to harvest credentials or steal personal information.

First National Bank has warned of an increase in phishing and smishing attacks, IT-Online reports. Trish Ramdhani, head of fraud at FNB Card, stated, “In recent cases, some consumers received SMSes claiming that their bank requires them to urgently FICA by clicking on a link that takes them to the fraudster’s platform, where their information is then compromised.

Russia’s APT28 (also known as “Fancy Bear” or “BlueDelta”) is using spear phishing to compromise Ukrainian government and military entities, according to researchers at Recorded Future. The phishing emails are designed to exploit vulnerabilities in the open-source webmail software Roundcube.

A phishing campaign is impersonating cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase, Tech.co reports. Crypto trader Jacob Canfield described the campaign in a Twitter thread, stating that the threat actors texted and then called him.

Using credibility-building imagery and creating a need for the user to click what may or may not be perceived as an image is apparently all it takes to engage potential phishing victims. Phishing attacks only need two things: something to create a sense of urgency and something to establish a sense of credibility.

Using an external platform trusted by potential victims is proving to be a vital tool in the cybercriminal’s arsenal. New data shows the state of the threat and who’s at risk. The average business experienced around 81 social media attacks each month in Q1 of this year, according to new data from PhishLabs, increasing 12% over Q4, 2022 and 5% over Q1 of 2022.