What W-2 phishing looks like
According to a recent federal court decision, an employee who is tricked into sharing personal information in response to a W-2 phishing email can be seen as committing an intentional disclosure under the North Carolina Identity Theft Protection Act (NCITPA). As a result, the employer could face triple damages for the employee’s mistake, adding a new element to potential exposure for businesses.
Employees who fall for CEO Fraud commit an "intentional disclosure"
Poyner Spruill's J.M Durnovich was right to highlight this development, which was also picked up by the nationwide Law360 site.
The failure to train employees may quickly become more costly not only for for North Carolina employers. This decision will be looked at by other courts who very well might come to the same conclusion that not taking reasonable ... Read More
CEO fraud reaches 1 in 6 users
With an average of 1 in 6 users receiving email-based impersonation attacks (CEO fraud attempts) , it spells bad news for organizations.
Cybercriminals need users to believe the emails being sent are legitimate. No better way can be found than to impersonate someone known to the sender. According to email security vendor Mimecast, email impersonation—aka CEO Fraud or Business Email Compromise—has risen 80% over last quarter in their latest Email Security Risk Assessment Report.
Impersonation works
Utilizing the findings from the inspection of over 140 million messages, Mimecast’s report is particularly statistically relevant and should be given the proper attention. The massive increase in impersonation denotes the cybercriminals finding greater successes with impersonation than without.
Over 40,000 impersonated email messages reached users’ inboxes, demonstrating that bad guy ingenuity can ... Read More
CEO fraud victims had weak cybersecurity
A recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission report of nine companies that had been victims of CEO fraud...had sufficient internal controls in place as required by law.
The report focused on what the FBI calls “business email compromise” and what in InfoSec circles is known as CEO Fraud: cyber criminals pose as company executives to dupe staff into sending company funds to bank accounts controlled by the hackers. The FBI estimates such scams have led to a whopping 12 billion dollars in losses since 2013.
In some cases, attacks on these companies lasted months and were only discovered when law enforcement intervened. Each had securities listed on a national stock exchange and lost at least 1 million, though two lost more than 30 million and one ... Read More
Big $$ in social engineering
According to an alert published last year by the FBI, Business Email Compromise (BEC) and Email Account Compromise (EAC) have caused $12 billion in losses since October 2013. Traditionally, social engineering and intrusion techniques have been the most common ways to gain access to business email accounts and dupe individuals to wire funds to an attacker-controlled account. These methods play out as follows:
Social engineering and email spoofing: Attackers will use social engineering to pose as a colleague or business partner and send fake requests for information or the transfer of funds. These emails can be quite convincing as the attacker makes a significant effort to identify an appropriate victim and register a fake domain, so that at first glance the email appears to belong to a ... Read More
Triton got into a petrochemical plant
In the summer of 2017, a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia experienced a worrisome security incident that cybersecurity experts consider to be the first-ever cyber attack carried out with “a blatant, flat-out intent to hurt people.” The attack involved a highly sophisticated new malware strain called Triton, which was capable of remotely disabling safety systems inside the plant with potentially catastrophic consequences. It all started when someone launched a spear phishing attack and someone else clicked a link they should not have clicked.
Luckily, a flaw in the Triton code triggered a safety system that responded by shutting down the plant. If it hadn’t been for that flaw, the hackers could have released toxic hydrogen sulfide gas or caused explosions. As ... Read More
Phishing and File Sharing
Internet thieves have long used file sharing sites and services to host their malicious files. When they do this, they typically use the underlying service to generate download links that anyone can click without logging in to the hosting service.
Over the past month we started noticing apparently legitimate Dropbox emails pushing links to files with names suspiciously similar to those routinely used by the bad guys. When we clicked the links to check, however, we were greeted with a demand to log in to the service. That's typically been a sign that the files involved were legit.
Still, something wasn't right here. Given the file names presented, we reckoned there was little chance those files were innocuous. So, we decided to log in to ... Read More
Ransomware knocked most systems offline
Officials in Jackson County, Georgia, paid $400,000 to cyber-criminals this week to get rid of a ransomware infection and regain access to their IT systems. The County hired cyber-security consultant to negotiate ransom fee with hacker group. Jackson County officials have not yet confirmed how hackers breached their network.
The infection forced most of the local government's IT systems offline, with the exception of its website and 911 emergency system.
"Everything we have is down," Sheriff Janis Mangum told StateScoop in an interview. "We are doing our bookings the way we used to do it before computers. We're operating by paper in terms of reports and arrest bookings. We've continued to function. It's just more difficult."
Jackson County officials notified the FBI and hired a cyber-security consultant. ... Read More
Office Depot $300 scam - yes, it really happened
I'm sure you've heard something about the Office Depot $300 fraud. For a thorough explanation, see https://cybersafetynet.net/office-depot-faked-malware-scans-to-sell-unneeded-300-tech-services/. Basically, Office Depot's malware scan reported malware on computers that did not have malware. Office Depot then sold an unnecessary $300 service. Today I am writing about how that would look in other industries.
We have a high level of trust in those who provide professional services. We go to them when we sense a problem and need their training, judgement and professionalism to turn the problem into a solution. Let's see how this would play out in another industry.
Electrical
Your kitchen has a refrigerator, microwave oven and coffee maker. You discover that you can run two at the same time, but ... Read More
Is this the best Facebook phishing scam ever?
Scams seeking to harvest online credentials have long tried to replicate known logon pages. But this newly found instance is just about perfect.
In every scam that uses social engineering, the key is to be believable. If it looks right, feels right, has the timing right, etc., the victim is more likely to fall for it. This latest scam seeks to take advantage of a user’s desire to leverage single sign-on (SSO) via well-known websites. In this case, Facebook. Rather than creating (and remembering) countless passwords for an equivalently large number of websites, users will take advantage of identifying themselves via Facebook.
Under normal circumstances, a Facebook API is called which prompts the user to authenticate. But researchers at security vendor Myki have ... Read More
A phishing attack will strike you. It is not a question of IF, but a question of WHEN
With the massive rise in phishing attacks, 2019 is the year for organizations to realize the concept of becoming a victim is an issue of when and no longer if.
According to Malwarebyte’s 2019 State of Malware report, there is pretty much no industry that is unaffected by malware. And phishing attacks remain an effective means of tricking users. In Healthcare alone, nearly one-half of orgs citing a 1-10% click rate when interacting with mock-phishing emails to test user response, and another one-quarter of organizations seeing click rates of 11-30%.
These numbers clearly indicate that organizations simply aren’t prepared for phishing attacks.
What you can do
What’s needed is an anti-phishing plan in place that helps to ... Read More