Thirty-four percent of state and local government entities were hit by ransomware in 2024, a new report from Sophos has found. While this is a decrease compared to the attack rate in 2023, the mean cost of recovery for these entities has more than doubled to $2.83 million. Seventy-two percent of ransom demands made to state and local government organizations in 2024 were for $1 million or more, with 37% of demands for $5 million or more.

As I sit in the 2024 Seattle Convene conference this week and listen to speaker after speaker talk about their successful security awareness training programs, one thing is perfectly clear. They all prefer carrots and fewer sticks. A question human risk managers frequently ask me is what role negative consequences should play in a successful security awareness training program?

New data shows the most prevalent and obvious path into an organization – email – continues to be exploited by a growing number of cybercriminals. Email is one of those technologies that doesn’t seem willing to be replaced by collaborative tools that connect individuals and organizations – in many cases – in far more productive ways. And because of this, cybercriminals continue to leverage email to gain access to users.

As artificial intelligence (AI) technology advances, its influence on social media has become more and more pervasive and riddled with challenges. In particular, the ability for humans to discern genuine content from AI-generated material. Our recent survey conducted with OnePoll on over 2,000 UK workers found that a substantial portion of social media users are struggling to navigate this new digital frontier.

Threat actors are abusing a technique called “URL rewriting” to hide their phishing links from security filters, according to researchers at Perception Point. Security tools from major vendors use URL rewriting to prevent phishing attacks, but the same technique can be abused to trick these tools into thinking a malicious link is legitimate.

As Europe is returning from summer breaks, it is time to reflect on the first half of 2024 and look forward to the rest of the year. Ransomware attacks on hospitals, blue screens across the world crippling airline operations and other industries, deepfakes to sway opinion and possibly elections, deepfake social engineering tactics to extort significant amounts of money - so far the year has kept cybersecurity professionals busy.

The ransomware threat group formerly known as "Royal" has rebranded itself as BlackSuit and updated their attack methods, warns the FBI. The latest advisory from the FBI on ransomware threat group BlackSuit, is actually an updated 18-month-old advisory originally released to warn organizations about the threat group Royal. It appears that the group has rebranded, according to the advisory, and has updated their methods of attack.

When it comes to the duration of a ransomware attack and the subsequent recovery process, the numbers are staggering and vary wildly. Partly because there’s no single source which compiles all the information in a consistent manner. On average, a cyber attack can last anywhere from a few days to several weeks, with the recovery time often extending to months or even years.

Recently, we had a customer reach out to ask if disabling clickable uniform resource locator (URL) links in emails was enough protection by itself to potentially not need employee security awareness training and simulated phishing. We can understand why this misperception might exist. Many anti-phishing educational lessons discuss the need for people to evaluate all URL links before clicking on them.

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is alive and well, and used in attacks to obfuscate malicious links in phishing emails to redirect users to threat-actor controlled websites. We saw earlier this year that phishing attacks leveraging XSS were on the rise. Now, new scams are using XSS to hide their malicious intent within emails, according to new analysis from cybersecurity vendor INKY. These attacks usually begin with an email stating the victim has won something, as shown below: Source: INKY.