California wildfires used for social engineering
Internet thieves are using the California wildfires as a social engineering tactic to trick you into buying gift cards supposedly intended for victims of the disaster, according to James Linton at Agari. The scammers send emails to employees of organizations posing as their CEO.
These CEO Fraud emails target employees who work in accounting, finance, or administration, and tell their recipients to purchase gift cards worth hundreds of dollars to be sent to clients affected by the fires. The employees are instructed to send photos of the codes on the purchased cards, after which the criminals can use online services to convert them into regular currency.
Scammers exploit tragedies
One of the demoralizing byproducts of large-scale tragedies is the tendency for scammers to exploit people’s charitable ... Read More
Good guys: 1. CEO fraud: 0
The case of how the FBI turned the tables on cybercriminals using the very same tactics demonstrates how powerful the art of social engineering and deception can get a victim to act.
This story starts with cranes and ergonomic lifting manufacturer Gorbel who were scammed out of $82,000 using a simple fileless CEO scam. The accounts payable team was sent an official-looking email from an account purporting to be the CEO. The scam worked, Gorbel was out the $82K, and the FBI was brought in.
But, it wasn’t enough to take Gorbel for tens of thousands of dollars; no, the cybercriminals wanted to take a drink from the same well a second time, again purporting to be the CEO.
Turning the tables
With the FBI engaged, ... Read More
Attractive target
The real estate industry is a particularly attractive target for CEO Fraud, according to FBI spokesman David Fitz. Fitz told The Baltimore Sun that the industry’s day-to-day activities present a host of opportunities for scammers, including large, online transactions and a great deal of remote communication.
Between January 2017 and November 2018, sixty victims in Maryland lost over $2 million combined as a result of hijacked real estate transactions. Fitz notes that those numbers could be much higher, since many individuals and companies may refrain from reporting that they were scammed.
Hacked email account
A CEO Fraud real estate scam usually starts with an attacker hacking the email account of an agent or company employee, often via a phishing email. The attacker then observes the correspondence within ... Read More
CEO fraud villian posed as a contractor
Months after a classic CEO fraud scam took Galveston County, Texas for $525,000, County Judge Mark Henry is now asking for the County Auditor and Purchasing Agent to resign.
It’s one of the easiest scams to pull off – do a little homework and identify a contractor working for a business or government with lots of money, impersonate someone from the contractor’s accounting department, and send an email to the victim organization asking for a bill to be paid. In the case of Galveston County, this is pretty much as sophisticated as it got. The scammer pretended to be working for Lucas Construction, a Houston company doing road work for the county.
Look for the red flags
And just as the CEO Fraud is relatively ... 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