Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

When it comes to cyberattacks, the human dimension of the cybersecurity environment is a complex vulnerability. Without awareness, any employee, contractor or user is the most unprotected asset. A person who can be easily exploited with a social engineering attack. Because of inherent human characteristics — ignorance, fear, misplaced trust — people are by nature very susceptible to being manipulated to let down their guard.

John Kevin Adriano, Trustwave SpiderLabs Security Researcher Tax season is a busy time of year for taxpayers and threat actors. Consumers and businesses focus on filing their taxes and getting excited over possible refunds, while cybercriminals roll out both their tried-and-true tax scams along with implementing new efforts.

Cybersecurity experts continue to warn that advanced chatbots like ChatGPT are making it easier for cybercriminals to craft phishing emails with pristine spelling and grammar, the Guardian reports. Corey Thomas, CEO of Rapid7, stated, “Every hacker can now use AI that deals with all misspellings and poor grammar. The idea that you can rely on looking for bad grammar or spelling in order to spot a phishing attack is no longer the case.

The US FBI is warning of business email compromise (BEC) attacks designed to steal physical goods. While BEC attacks are typically associated with stealing money, criminals can use the same social engineering tactics to hijack deliveries of valuable materials. The FBI says fraudsters are particularly interested in stealing construction materials, agricultural supplies, computer technology hardware and solar energy products.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) have arrested four alleged members of an organized crime group known for carrying out business email compromise (BEC) attacks, BleepingComputer reports. The victims of the gang’s attacks lost between $2,500 and $500,000. “Four members of an alleged cyber criminal syndicate accused of money laundering $1.7 million in stolen cash from Australian and overseas victims have been charged in Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne,” the AFP said in a statement.

This vector abuses Microsoft Direct Send service in order to propagate phishing emails from an external sender to an internal user, whilst spoofing the properties of a valid internal user. This “feature” has existed since before 2016. However, threat intelligence available to JUMPSEC has only observed it being abused recently.

The details in this thwarted VEC attack demonstrate how the use of just a few key details can both establish credibility and indicate the entire thing is a scam. It’s not every day you hear about a purely social engineering-based scam taking place that is looking to run away with tens of millions of dollars. But, according to security researchers at Abnormal Security, cybercriminals are becoming brazen and are taking their shots at very large prizes.

New data shows that phishing mobile devices as an attack vector is growing in popularity – mostly because it’s increasingly working... in exponential terms. We all know phishing is the number one attack vector. But we should wonder whether phishing attacks that hit a corporate desktop email client or a mobile device are more impactful.

Trustwave’s MailMarshal received a major update this month with the addition of PageML to the Blended Threat Module. The BTM enables the email security solution to conduct in-depth, real-time scans when a URL in an email is clicked to determine if the URL is malicious. PageML boosts the BTM’s ability to detect malicious URLs by one-third by applying machine learning techniques to page content in real time. The new scanning feature is named PageML, short for Page Machine Learning.

At the end of 2021 Cloudflare launched Security Center, a unified solution that brings together our suite of security products and unique Internet intelligence. It enables security teams to quickly identify potential security risks and threats to their organizations, map their attack surface and mitigate these risks with just a few clicks. While Security Center initially focused on application security, we are now adding crucial zero trust insights to further enhance its capabilities.