The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued guidance to help medium-sized organizations defend themselves against business email compromise (BEC) attacks, especially those targeting senior staff members. The NCSC says employees should be cautious about the type of personal information they post on the internet, since criminals can use this knowledge to make their attacks more convincing.

Researchers at IBM X-Force are tracking several large phishing campaigns spreading an updated version of the Grandoreiro banking trojan. The criminal malware operation was disrupted by law enforcement in January 2024 but resurfaced in March with an expanded set of targets. The new version of the malware is targeting more than 1,500 banks in over sixty countries.

New data covering cyber insurance claims through 2023 shows claims have increased while reaffirming what we already know: phishing and social engineering are the real problem. If you’ve read enough of my articles here, you already know my view is a bit skewed towards the need for organizations to be aware of the true dangers of email-based cyber attacks.

Analysis of over 3.5 billion attacks provides insight into where threat actors are placing their efforts and where you should focus your cyber defenses. It’s said you can predict the outcome of the presidential election with a small number of votes. That’s the power of statistics and a valid sample size. So, when you have 3.5 billion cyber attacks as your sample data, it’s a very accurate reflection of the state of attacks.

Despite growing security investments in prevention, detection and response to threats, users are still making uninformed mistakes and causing breaches. One of the basic tenets of KnowBe4 is that your users provide the organization with an opportunity to have a material (and hopefully positive) impact on a cyber attack. They are the ones clicking malicious links, opening unknown attachments, providing company credentials on impersonated websites and falling for social engineering scams of all kinds.

Regardless of whether your environment is on-premises, in the cloud or hybrid, new data makes it clear that users are the top cybersecurity concern, and we cover what you can do about it. According to Netwrix’s 2024 Hybrid Security Trends Report, 79% of organizations experience one or more security incidents in the last 12 months. This is a 16% increase from the previous year, demonstrating that attacks are not subsiding one bit and that they are increasingly successful.

Rapid7 reports an interesting social engineering scheme that easily bypasses content filtering defenses and creatively uses a fake help desk to supposedly “help” users put down the attack. The Black Basta ransomware group, also covered in a recent CISA warning bulletin, floods a victim’s email inbox with many, many emails. The emails are often otherwise legitimate emails, such as newsletter confirmation emails, which most email content filtering gateways would not block.

A scam operation called “Estate” has attempted to trick nearly a hundred thousand people into handing over multi-factor authentication codes over the past year, according to Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch. The scammers target users of Amazon, Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Coinbase, Instagram, Mastercard, PayPal, Venmo, Yahoo and more.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) San Francisco division warns that threat actors are increasingly using AI tools to improve their social engineering attacks. “AI provides augmented and enhanced capabilities to schemes that attackers already use and increases cyber-attack speed, scale, and automation,” the FBI says.

New data shows that despite the massive evolution of the cybercrime economy, threat actors are sticking with the basics in social engineering attacks, with a goal at stealing data. I probably could have called this purely based on all the articles I’ve written (and all the articles I’ve read that never made it here). But when it comes to protecting your organization from social engineering, stick to the basics.