Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

I received this email the other day to my personal email account. It is a “Security Alert” from “Microsoft Helpdesk.” Oh, my! Not only is Microsoft holding five emails headed to me, but my “subscription” is expiring on the same day. The “Unsubscribe” link was just a graphic, no URL. The URL to the main button, “Review All Held Messages results” was linked to the following path (shown below): That is clearly not Microsoft or microsoft.com.

AI maturation is leading to more malicious hacking attacks. Like thousands of cybersecurity thought leaders, I’ve been speaking about AI being used maliciously since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022. I’m far from alone. The entire cybersecurity industry has been warning about it nonstop. We’ve known that as AI progresses, attackers would use those same productivity features, thereby harming us.

Human error remains the primary exploitation vector in mobile security incidents, according to Verizon’s latest Mobile Security Index (MSI). “At 44%, user behavior is the top cited breach contributor, just ahead of app threats, network threats, and internet threats, which were each cited by 43% of survey respondents,” the report says.

A study from Malwarebytes has found that one in three mobile users has been targeted by an extortion scam, and one in five of these users has fallen victim. Additionally, one in six users has been targeted by sextortion, with a higher number of these attacks (38%) affecting Gen Z users.

Attackers can more easily introduce malicious data into AI models than previously thought, according to a new study from Antropic. Poisoned AI models can produce malicious outputs, leading to follow-on attacks. For example, attackers can train an AI model to provide links to phishing sites or plant backdoors in AI-generated code.

One of the biggest reasons why cybercrime is so bad — and is increasing each year —is that so much of it is committed by foreign nationals who are not physically located in the country they are attacking. This makes it far harder for law enforcement to identify, stop and arrest cybercriminals, as often the victim country’s legal jurisdictions, warrants and courts do not apply in the criminal’s country.

Cybercriminals want their payday. Unfortunately for the targets of phishing (and the organizations they work for) that means they’re constantly refining their tactics to create more sophisticated attacks that are harder to detect – by both email security products and people. Impersonation attacks enable cybercriminals to leverage the trusted relationships and – often – authority of people and brands that the recipient knows and trusts.

The integration of artificial intelligence into the modern workplace represents a paradigm shift in productivity and innovation. From desktops to mobile devices, AI agents are now deeply embedded in daily workflows, augmenting human intelligence and accelerating business processes at an unprecedented scale.

In the complex ecosystem of financial services, some of the greatest threats come from within. While cybersecurity for financial institutions often focuses on external threat actors, the reality is that insider risks—whether intentional or accidental—pose an equally dangerous challenge to regulatory compliance and organizational integrity.