CEO Fraud Scam costs firm $6 million
Knowbe4 and CNBC reported some pretty stunning breaking news. I cannot come up with a better case for new-school security awareness training for employees in accounting and HR.
A lawsuit filed on Friday September 16, 2016 by Tillage Commodities Fund alleges that $6 billion SS&C Technologies Holdings, a financial services software firm, showed an egregious lack of diligence and care, when they fell for a CEO fraud scam that ultimately led to hackers in China looting $5.9 million.
Tillage claims that SS&C didn't follow their own policies, which enabled the theft, but to add insult to injury, staffers actually helped the criminals by fixing transfer orders that had initially failed. The documents were posted online by the law firm representing Tillage in the case. Above is the stock price on Monday, before ... Read More
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. CAMERON PARK, CA (November 12, 2020) – Cyber Safety Net today announced How Hacks Happen and how to protect yourself was awarded the Nonfiction Authors Association's Gold Award.
"The Nonfiction Authors Association sets the bar extremely high," says author Mark Anthony Germanos. "To have How Hacks Happen be reviewed by other authors and receive the Gold Award is truly an honor. I am glad the reviewers, and reading public as a whole, are finding How Hacks Happen valuable. The content helps keep you safe online." Some sample reviews are as follows:
In How Hacks Happen, Mark Anthony Germanos uses two author personas to explain and illustrate the hazards to our online information: the cybersecurity expert trying to help us and the black-hat hacker exploiting our ... Read More
Free email services monetize your personal information. Use one of them and you are vulnerable. Free email and social media services are indexing and monetizing your mailbox data. They use that information for their gain, not yours.
Gmail monetizes your personal informationFor example, https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en says “When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited ... Read More
Google tracks you (but you can purge what they know)
Two days ago, I wrote about how Google tracks you. Please see https://wp.me/paAiP4-wh for a refresher.
Go to the Google Dashboard at https://myaccount.google.com/dashboard. Let’s just download this data. Click the Download your data link, which takes you to https://takeout.google.com. Scroll through this list of services Google thinks you use. Google checks all by default. At the bottom, click the Next step button.
I am choosing to export this data once, save the data as a .ZIP file and span my data across multiple .ZIP files when the files are larger than 2 GB. Click the Create export button.
Google reports “This process can take a long time (possibly hours or days) to complete. You'll receive an email when your ... 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