The threat of novel malware is growing exponentially, making it more difficult for security solutions to identify attachments and links to files as being malware. According to BlackBerry’s new Global Threat Intelligence Report, the problem of novel malware has been continually growing over the last year. At the beginning of last year, BlackBerry was detecting new malware at a rate of just one per minute. By the next month, it was 1.5, 2.9 pieces per minute by August of last year.

A Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) platform called “Tycoon 2FA” has surged in popularity over the past several months, according to researchers at Sekoia. The phishing kit is notable for its focus on bypassing victims’ multi-factor authentication measures.

A new report on the state of email security sheds some light on how organizations are viewing and approaching cyber insurance as they shift strategy toward being cyber resilient. The topic of cyber insurance has been covered quite a bit here on this blog. From when cyber insurance first began as a concept, to the challenges it poses for organizations looking as their last resort after an attack, to changes in insurance policy and law.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) newly-released Internet Crimes Report provides an unbiased big picture of the cyber crimes that were the most used and most successful. A few weeks ago we covered the alarming trends on ransomware, and FBI’s IC3 division took in over 880,000 complaints last year from individuals and businesses about every cyber crime being committed. Unfortunately, the details on overall cyber crime show things are not improving.

New data shows increased expertise in leveraging and exploiting cloud environments. CrowdStrike’s 2024 Global Threat Report shows that targeted attacks on cloud environments have increased, signaling that the cybercrime economy has realized the “untapped market” of the cloud environment.

In an age when 70% - 90% of successful data breaches involve social engineering (which gets past all other defenses), sufficient training is needed to best reduce human-side cybersecurity risk. Everyone should be trained in how to recognize social engineering attempts, how to mitigate (i.e., delete, ignore, etc.) them, and how to appropriately report them if in a business scenario. The amount of time an organization should devote to security awareness training (SAT) is still up for debate.

The threat group "RA World" (formerly RA Group) has shifted from country-specific ransomware attacks to include specific industries via a new - not previously seen - method of extortion. I don’t like it when I hear about ransomware groups growing, but that's the case in TrendMicro’s new analysis of RA World ransomware. What was once through to be a smaller operation focused on attacks targeting organizations in South Korea and the U.S.

The following paragraphs were cited directly from my recent article highlighting social engineering. "Social engineering and phishing are involved in 70% to 90% of all successful cybersecurity attacks. No other initial root hacking cause comes close. This is not a recent development. Social engineering has been the number one type of attack since the beginning of networked computers. Despite this long-time fact, most organizations do not spend 3% of their IT/IT Security budget to fight it.

Researchers at IBM X-Force are monitoring several ongoing phishing campaigns by the Russian state-sponsored threat actor ITG05 (also known as “APT28” or “Fancy Bear”). APT28 has been tied to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.